PBD Podcast - Who Is Curtis Yarvin? | PBD Podcast | Ep. 717

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Patrick Bet-David sits down with Curtis Yarvin for a deep, unfiltered conversation on his influence in Silicon Valley and Washington, his relationships with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Donald Trump, and how power, technology, and ideology are colliding to reshape America’s future.------Ⓜ️ MINNECT WITH CURTIS YARVIN: https://bit.ly/4qUhii4🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4g57zR2⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!ABOUT US:Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm supposed to take sweet victory. I know this life meant for me. Adam, what's your point? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever signs. Right here. You are a one of one?

I think I've ever said this before. So we got a special guest here. There's going to be a group of you that are going to be driven insane by what he has to say, but there's going to be many of you that are going to say, It's actually a good point. Like even right now what's going on in the world, Venezuela, you know, just fell Iran with what they're going through. They went from a monarchy to whatever you want to call it with, you know, a totalitarian regime under Khomeini. And then should they go to a constitutional monarchy? Should they go to a traditional democracy?

What works? What doesn't work? My guess today, here's what he said before. So brace for impact. We can have a two-hour conversation. But these are some of the things that he said that's driven people insane. Some races are more suited to slavery than others. That will upset a lot of people. Democracy is not a solution. It is the problem. The United States should be run like a corporation. If Americans want change, they should stop voting.

The democratic experiment has failed. Real power in America is held by an unelected regime. Equality is not a natural human condition. Order is more important than freedom. Curtis Yardin, it's great to have you on. pleasure to be here Patrick. So how did you come up with these ideas? How did this like? How did I come up with these ideas? Yes. You know, my gosh, how did I come up with these ideas as I was kind of a, you know, a little bit of a normy libertarian kind of person? And I started reading

a little bit and I started thinking a little bit. And after a little while, I'd had a little too much to think. And I think that, you know, the way you come up with these ideas is you're sort of in, You ever seen the movie The Truman Show? Of course. You watch The Truman Show. It's a really, really great movie. And, you know, Truman, you know, just starts to notice these things about the world he lives in that just aren't real. They can't possibly be real.

You know, the sky, the horizon is kind of stitched together. You know, I'll give you an example of one of these things. That's very, very simple, which is that you have these two words, politics and democracy. And you might notice that analytically these words mean the same thing. Do they? Well, you know, what is democracy without politics? It sounds like something that might have in North Korea. You know, actually, you know, the full name of North Korea is the DPRK.

That's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That is three euphemisms for democracy, one place name, and it's a monarchy. And so, you know, this is one of the things that we sort of see across history is that basically regimes, well, they tend to lie. They tend to actually sort of, you know, conceal the most basic things about what they are. Let's go, for example, to the United Kingdom. It's not a kingdom. No one could possibly describe it objectively as a kingdom. It's true that it has a king.

but the idea that the king is running the government is preposterous. Okay. And everyone in the UK recognizes that the idea that the king is running the government is preposterous. It wasn't really true, let's say, in 1725 that the king was running the government. That would be, I guess, George I first. But people really believed it was the case then. And so you have these, you know, when we call the U.S. a democracy, You know, it's actually much more similar to calling the United Kingdom a kingdom than we might think.

One of the ways that you can see this is, again, if you look at these words, democracy and politics, you'll hear that they have opposite valances. So democracy, anything democratic is good. You know, we're going to democratize U.S. foreign policy. I don't know what it means, but it has to be good. we're going to politicize U.S. foreign policy, clearly bad. Like, we don't want this to be political. The word political has acquired a negative valence.

You know, we're going to put politicians in charge of the government. Politicians, nobody likes politicians. How should they be in charge of the government? And then you're just like, wait, but isn't having politicians in charge of the government what we mean when we say democracy? Moreover, when we look at actually the way that Washington, D.C. works, I actually grew up, my father was in the U.S. Foreign Service in the State Department. So you grew up in the State Department, and they have very much this attitude of, like,

politics is this, like, dirty thing that needs to be kept out of government whenever possible, right? It's like you're sort of clearly seeing, okay, we have to kind of pretend to be this, but if you actually look at the way that U.S. foreign policy changes when you have a presidential election, we'll get to Congress later, but until Donald Trump, until Donald Trump's really second term, actually the influence of the election on foreign policy is pretty minimal, and the influence of the presidential election on domestic policy is almost zero, because domestic policy is run by Congress.

And so, you know, we have these situations where everyone goes out in this election. And they really think that they're, like they talk as if they were electing a king. They say Donald Trump is in power. He's certainly not a negligible, you know, force in Washington. In fact, I'd say, you know, one way to look at,

the sort of the paradox of the Trump administration is to say, well, I think it's pretty unquestionable that the second Trump administration had maybe 10 times as much impact on Washington as the first Trump. There's no question. It's not even closed. Second, it sounds like it's been three terms in one. It could be this, it could be 10 times as much, it could be 20 times as much. And if you look at, well, wait a second, there's a punchline. So if you look at the, if you compare the first Trump administration to the Bush administration, again, you know, it's not as much of a difference, but it's 3x, 5x, you know, as much of an impact. I mean, Trump to Bush.

Bush to Trump. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you remember the first Trump administration, it's like the liberals are like, the sky's falling every day. Sure. Right? And now they're like, the sky's falling every day, right? And so-

Are you saying him to Bush, he got three times more done or Bush to Trump? Bush got three times more done. No, but Trump, even the first term, Trump had three times as much impact as Bush. So the thing is what you're seeing. from the perspective of the New York Times reader, you're just like, oh, my God, this politician, this, you know, carnival barker has this immense power over the government, which is the most important thing around, and we're all going to die. And it's like, well, even, you know, let's acknowledge that these enormous increases in power

are true. Okay. But, you know, power is something that you can measure. on a zero to one scale. Zero is you have no power, you don't matter. One is absolute power. So if you're looking at anything that's measurable on a zero to one scale, you know, does she love me, does she love me not? You know, one way to look at that is to say,

all right, let me forget about where I am on this scale relatively and figure out where I am on the scale absolutely. Because actually when you're seeing those kinds of increases, you know, when you're seeing increases by an order of magnitude, for example, what you see is that those kinds of increases are most available at the bottom of the absolute spectrum. So when you're going...

Meaning closer to zero, not closer to one. If you can multiply anything by 100 and it's still less than one, it's got to be a very small number. And so what people don't really realize, about the post-1945 American political system is that it goes from, of course, in 1945, FDR dies. FDR is pretty close to one. He's pretty close to being, to really having absolute power over the government, especially

in wartime, but also before wartime. He's really running the government like a CEO. And if you look at like, you know, there's a diary I have of one of his capital. cabinet secretaries and you look at FDR's cabinet meetings, they're like a CEO running a C-suite meeting. Okay, if you look at one of Trump's cabinet meetings, it's similar. It's not like that. No, it's really not like that because actually the government, the way that Washington today works is when you're a CEO of a company, I actually am a CEO of a company, when you're the CEO of a company, one of the sort of worst terms of like you're not a

good CEO is to say that you're reactive. Okay. You're always reacting to things that happen. You're not making proactive decisions. You're not sort of steering. You're basically reacting to your inbound. Sure. Companies doing really well and doesn't really need a CEO. Maybe it's fine to have a reactive CEO. Okay. But FDR was a proactive CEO. You know, he could say, oh, we're going to build, you know, look at like Route 1, for example, on the California coast. That's an FDR project. That's a New Deal, I believe California Conservation Corps project. Imagine building Route 1 today. Completely unimaginably impossible. It would be much harder than building the high-speed rail.

Right. And so what you're seeing is you're seeing the state which is almost entirely based on bureaucratic process. And when you're working in a process-based regime, everything is procedural, everything, you're almost, as a civil servant, you're almost something like a judge in a way, because everything you're doing is following a process. But FDR needed a crisis. Without that, he wouldn't have the power that he had, right? I mean, take the crisis out. Well, yeah, the way that FDR, I mean, the way that FDR gains this power is very specific to the 1930s.

And so, for example, one of the things you'll see in 1932, when FDR is, you're going to, running in the election. The Democratic Party is, of course, America's traditional conservative party at this time. And it's been basically taken over from the inside by radical progressives. The first example of this is what Drew Wilson. FPR comes back again with the same thing, but he's still running as a Democrat. And so if you look at the 1932 political platform of Roosevelt, it's a traditional Democrat. platform, which means small government, less spending, hard money, et cetera, et cetera, and on this platform, he gets the votes of, you know, the solid South and the inner city Catholics,

which basically drive him, you know, into office. Be that as in May, forgetting, I mean, America in 1932 is such a different country from today. Night and day. More different from any country today on Earth, right? But, you know, he managed to do that. basically managed to create the new do. He created the Washington that we have today. And so, you know, one of the things, if you step back and look at U.S. history over the last 250 years, which you see is actually you're seeing transitions between forms of government. You know how

the French talk about the first republic, second republic, third republic. So in American history, we have three administrations that basically establish a regime. We have the Washington administration, which is actually run by Hamilton. We have the Lincoln administration, and we have the FDR's administration. These things happen about every 75 or 80 years. They basically involve consolidation of the power of the federal government under a single individual. They basically, who is essentially a CEO of the government,

this is what Hamilton and Washington were doing, this is what Lincoln was doing, this is what FDR is doing, love them or hate them, you know, it's a neutral, thing. They did plenty of good and bad things, both, you know, that's sort of, that's what creates an administration. If you look at, you know, being a California person, if you look at the New Deal, again, I think they did plenty of things wrong. I think they made plenty of terrible choices. They were also run like a startup. And so if you're looking for like a startup, Washington, you know, basically look at the New Deal. If you look, for example, at the

Manhattan Project. You know, libertarians will basically be like, oh, well, the government can't do anything efficiently. Well, the Manhattan Project is, number one, a government project. Number two, it is probably the most successful engineering project in history. Number three, it has run almost exactly like a California startup, right down to the two co-founders, right? You have the technical guy and the non-technical guy if you've seen Oppenheimer. And number four, they're all communists, if you've seen Oppenheim. Of course. And so, you know, that's not that combination of facts doesn't really fit into any kind of legendarium of the American political world.

What's the point you're making? Your point you're making is running like a startup, run it like a CEO, run it like a guy who's running a Fortune 100 company, let him make the decisions, a lot of executive orders. I don't need to get everyone's permission to do something. So if you look at, you know, I'm, I'm sort of trying to set the historical stage a little bit for where we are. So if you look at, you know, again, FDR creates this sort of really, I mean, he literally

literally conquers the world, right? You know, and he creates this kind of world conquering state, and people just looked at America at that time, whether they were Americans or foreign earth, they're just like, this is a country, this is a government that could do anything. So FDR dies in 45, and in 44, he picks Harry. Truman as his VP. Harry Truman is kind of a nobody. He's not even really a new dealer.

He's a man of sort of limited pretensions and limited abilities. And FDR replaces Henry Wallace, who was kind of a hardcore communist on his VP suite with Truman knowing, FDR knows, nobody else knows. Americans did not even know that FDR used a wheelchair. you're aware of that right like that's the level of like distance between reality and story that was totally routine back there right and people just people lived almost entirely in this comic book world so and you know on all sides that war was fought in a comic book world um you know and world war one is even more sort of comic books so you have basically a world where you have

this very simplistic drama that's presented to a very unsophisticated by today's standards audience, right? So they just see this sort of propaganda experience of the war. They have no idea that FDR is dying. They have no idea of the difference between FDR and Truman. Actually, what happens is that because Truman is a lightweight, and he does not take over the job of FDR. He is not really in charge. This is what FDR intended.

is like, I've assembled this amazing collection of just amazing, talented, first-rate people who can do anything. And I'm not going to have a successor. Instead, power is going to flow down into the regime, into the administration, into what we now call the deep state, and there's going to be no way to get it out. What FDR didn't understand really, or maybe understood but didn't care, who knows, was that a regime like that has no way, simply because you have this administration that is almost impossible to get rid of, there's no sort of Darwinian constraint on its performance, especially if it's ruling the world and doesn't have to worry about Canada invading or something like that.

And so the effectiveness of this organization has just been getting worse and worse and worse for the last 80 years. Doesn't that validate that, you know, the consul, we can come back to that. But the part I want to go with you on FDR is, would FDR have been FDR without a massive crisis? He used the crisis, right? Take the crisis out. He's not as historical figure as we would be talking about today. You can't really separate the man from his time. FDR is a pretty enigmatic figure. It's very, very hard to know what was going on in his head because he has not, you know, this regime has never been defeated. And so when you look at a defeated regime, it's analyzed by its enemies. This is who? This regime? The FDR regime? FDR's regime has never been defeated, right? You define that. What do you mean by that? Like no one's outdone him? No one's done any.

No one has done to him, for example. So, again, let's go back to the zero to one thing. If you're looking at a zero to one definition of regime change, okay, what's the most complete regime change that we've seen in our time? The fall of the Soviet Union, some people might say. But it was relatively a lot of the elites sort of kept their positions, a lot of things like it was actually a relatively incomplete regime change. You want to see complete regime change. go to Germany in 1945. That has the advantage of it being a regime change

that was carried out by liberals, so it's sort of hard for people to question it. That's an absolutely complete regime change. And so, you know, for example, you know, the allies come in and what are you going to do with the SS? Well, you might say, well, you know, what's the problem with this Nazi regime? Real problem is the Holocaust, you know, big problem.

what's the cause of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism in the SS. So we're going to stamp out anti-Semitism in the SS. And all the SS lunchrooms anywhere in Germany, the new administration is going to put posters, pro-Jew posters, and we're going to make it clear that the SS is a pro-Semitic organization now. That's not what they did. That is not even close to what they did.

Actually, the SS ceased to exist, and actually having been a member of this previously prestigious and powerful organization, became something shameful. Right. And, you know, love it or hate it, there were a lot of excesses in the Allied occupation of Germany,

but you can't say it didn't work. And so when I say that basically nobody has overthrown the New Deal, that's essentially what I mean. Nixon and Reagan both make some attempts at various levels of government reorganization, as Trump has made various attempts. Really, you know, if you look at the number of federal employees, for example,

through the 80s and the Reagan administration, you'll see it actually dips a little bit. And under Trump, it dips even more than that. It dips like 10% or so. Okay, but still, if we're comparing that to denotification, you're still at 0.001% of that. So, for example, in 1945, they're like, all right, we're going to denotify Germany. Okay. Well, But with that, you know, you can analogize that to de-wokification or something. Okay, how are we going to denazify Germany? Well, we're going to basically take all the books that were published in Germany between 1933 and 1945.

And if they are books that have any Nazi content, which, of course, imagine, you know, all the books that have progressive content. It's basically all of them. Sure. Okay. So what are we going to do? Except for maybe children. books and not even accepting children's books.

Have you been to a bookst or go to a Barnes & Noble? And you know how the Nazis burn books? You know, everyone's seen the picture of the Nazis burning books? This is a bunch of Nazi stormtroopers burning the library of the Institute for Sexual Research, which was the kind of key Weimar trans institution. They had a big, you know, big celebration, you know, throw gasoline on the books, whatever. It's very dramatic. Okay, the Allies in Germany in 1945.

They're very different from that. They're like, all right, it's going to be illegal to own any Nazi books, which are basically any books published in the last 12 years. And what are we going to do with these books? We're going to pulp them. They didn't burn them. They just turned them into toilet paper. You can find these books in Germany today.

Okay, I don't think it's illegal to possess them anymore. You're not going to find them randomly in a used bookstore. You can buy them in certain ways. Libraries have them and, you know, major libraries. And if you want to go and read these books, you will show that you have a legitimate academic need to read these books. Okay? Like you'll need to present like academic current interests.

So imagine treating progressivism that way. Okay. I'm not saying that this is what needs to be done. This is every historical situation is different. You had the enormous power that was generated at that time by winning a war. Right. But when we use, you know, this kind of language that Donald Trump, Trump uses, you know, he's uses this very like crossing the Rubicon kind of language,

like we're going to change everything, this is a revolution, you know, you've got to basically check yourself and say, no, this is 0.001 of a revolution. And when you have a real regime change in a country, everyone's life changes. Yeah, why do we do this? Can we do this? Just so the audience knows, because some of the audience doesn't know who you are. Okay, they're kind of wandering saying, who is this Curtis Yavon guy? You're very well-known in the Peter Thiel, in the Elon Musk, in the tech bro, billionaire, Silicon Valley.

They know who you are. And, you know, a lot of guys have said, you know, your ideas have been revolutionary. They follow it. We should consider what Curtis has to say. And in the likes of New York Times and others are going to say, this guy's crazy. He has no clue what he's talking about.

And he's the secret mastermind behind Trump and all the ideas that's coming up. That's kind of how they're depicting who you are. If you could describe to the audience in less than 60 seconds, what do you believe in? What would that be? Gosh, what do I believe in and what would that be? I would say what I believe is that in America, we're living inside this, you might say, 250-year-old myth of American governance.

Every state, every nation, every polity has a political formula. It has a reason that it believes. believes that its political system is right and just and true. And actually, if you're looking at Anglo-American governance, you're really going back more like 400 years. And so I essentially believe that the things that we think we've learned in the Anglo-American political tradition since essentially Elizabeth I first are basically not true. I think that actually the reasons for the success of the Anglo-American world,

are very different from the reasons that we think this success happened, and I actually just don't believe in our political system at all. You don't believe in our political system? I don't believe in it. Okay, so, you know, democracy, monarchy, right? The longest lasting democracy, when you look at the numbers, you know, on most articles, they'll say it's us, 238 years, and you'll see a bunch of different countries in democracies.

Switzerland. Switzerland, yeah, we've seen these, right? And then if you go to monarchies, you'll see Japan at the top, 2600 years, you'll see, you know, some real interesting Sweden. You'll see Morocco. You'll see UK. You'll see Norway, I think. Some of these countries are you see. Sure. But you have to distinguish actually, you know, not every democracy is a real democracy. Not every monarchy is a real monarchy. Perfect. One of the most important things, I think that, you know, if there's a single book that I'd recommend to sort of,

you know, for basically smart, curious people to sort of, you know, develop the skill of doing this kind of Truman show thing, of looking for, you know, when does this word mean its opposite? When was, there's a great book published by James Burnham in 1940. He's better known for the book, the managerial revolution, but his best book is actually a book I found in a used bookstore very randomly. It's called the Machiavellians. and it's a

essentially a very brief, readable, well-written summary of what's called the Italian School of Political Science with writers from around 1900 in Italy. This is, of course, well before Mussolini, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these writers were realists. They were profoundly realistic, and they insisted that the most important thing is to basically sort of abandon these symbolic statements and to see your reality for what it really is.

And so when you're decoding things like you have this word democracy. Democracy today in the modern world means legitimate government. When you claim to be democratic, you claim to be legitimate because we live in this sort of global democratic empire created by 1945 and even 1815. might argue. And so this is why North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. They have to claim to be democratic because that is a claim of legitimacy. Nonetheless, anyone can look at it for five seconds and say, no, this is actually a dynasty, right, the Kim family. Right. So when we look at, you know, our democracy to sort of go back to the basics in the way or what we call a democracy,

I would say that generally speaking, to paraphrase Aristotle, who knew everything about government, there are three forms of government. You have government of the one, the few, and the many. So Aristotle called these monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. So if you use the word democracy in today's political language, you mean one of two things. If you're George Soros, for example,

or someone from Soros' work, when you use the word democracy, you mean what is sometimes called meritocracy, sometimes called civil society. You mean the power of prestigious institutions, you know, the power of the experts. You know, democracy is, by definition, a legitimate government, which means it's good government, which means it's government guided by the best experts. Who would you have it guided by? You know, some shoemaker. You know, there's a, there's a famous cartoon in the New Yorker. Came out a couple of years ago where it's in the back of an airplane and the passengers are, there's some passengers stood up and is speaking and he's saying something like, you know,

why should we let these arrogant pilots who think they know all about flying airplanes, you know, like fly the plane. You know, I demand to, you know, I demand a vote of the people to, to, elect how to fly the plane. Right. No one who saw this cartoon, there you go, no one who saw this cartoon thought that they were laughing at democracy. No one, you know, looks at this cartoon, opens their New Yorker and says like, this is an anti-democracy cartoon. It is plainly an anti-democracy cartoon. It is plainly a cartoon about the absurdity of the literal word, democracy, because in fact, when you use the words like meritocracy and civil society and the rule and the rule of experts, the Aristotelian word is very, very plain. You're talking about

an oligarchy. You're talking about an institutional oligarchy. If these institutions believed in God, you would call it a theocracy without a second look. It's a regime very similar to the, you know, in ancient Egypt, you know, 3,000 years ago, they had the rule of the priests of a moon. you know, same exact system, right? And the role that elections serve in the system is not too dissimilar to the role that the King of England serves in England, right? It's not quite that because, you know, Trump is like,

Trump is a little like George III in some ways and that he's trying to revive the power of a kind of dying institution. So, you know, the president's... The dying institution. The presidency, because the presidency is very much going the way of, it's turning into President Camacho from mediocrisy. It's very much going the way of the British monarchy in becoming almost entirely ceremonial. And so, and.

Why do you say that? It's losing its power? The reality, its power is, it's power, it's been losing its power for 80 years. It lost most of its power in 1945 when FDR died. Due to Truman or due to FDR? Due to the death of FDR. And there was no way that anyone could have stepped into FDR shoes. So you're a big supporter of what FDR did?

No, actually, I think that FDR did some very bad things. But the, like, on the other hand, got to say he conquered the world, right? You know, he could certainly build a railroad, you know? And so when you have a government that can't even build a railroad, like beggars can't be choosers, right? You're actually in a situation of pretty poor governance in this country. And a lot of the problem that we have is that because we feel that we have this perfect system of government, you know, there's something very schizophrenic in the way conservatives view the government because they view the system is perfect, but somehow the system has produced these horrible results.

Like, how did that happen? Maybe we just have to put it back on the right course, you know, maybe just a little nudge, and it'll snap back into actually working perfectly because it's a perfect system after all. And in fact, if you look at the sort of, you know, let's go back to this thing of like democracy versus politics. So this idea that politics and politicians are bad is the idea that democracy is literal democracy is bad. Because there's another thing that we mean when we say democracy, we mean putting politicians in charge of the government. Right? And we mean populism. And so what we have is basically the sort of the political landscape of the mind today is that populism and meritocracy are fighting over this magic word democracy, which defines legitimacy. And everyone is like, well, this is democracy.

And the George Soros of the world are just like, well, you know, obviously having the best people in charge is democracy. and the Donald Trumps of the world are like, no, actually democracy is when elected politicians control the government. This is severely complicated in the American system by the fact, and this is something else that, so a lot of the things that I'm saying are things that are sort of quite obvious if you kind of think about them from a distance, but there are things that neither party is going to tell you, each for its own reasons. What are you suggesting? What do you want to see? What do I want to see?

Well, that's a long, that's a long, you know, it's like, let me, let's start with the diagnosis a little bit first, because understanding kind of how we got here, I want to, I'm a monarchist, I want to see monarchy. I want to see monarchy. I basically see that, you know, in this kind of context between populism and meritocracy for this magic word, democracy, you know, and if we were to use Aristotle's categories in a scientific way, we would say it's a contest between all the and democracy. And I think one of the things that you see, if you look at the sort of the red versus blue conflict in America, and I think this is true about a lot of different kinds of conflict historically is that whenever you see a conflict, the sort of the interpretation of that conflict

that should jump into your mind is that maybe each side is basically right about the other. And so, you must know a couple that's always fighting right and you're like well you know the problem is he's kind of right about her but she's also kind of right about him right and i think that actually what animates most people in america politically today is not so much affection for their own model as fear and loathing of the other model and so if you grew up you know like me you know new yorker Reader, State Department, Ivy League kind of house. This is a house. This is my cultural background is definitely America's ruling elite.

There's a lot of people more culturally elite than me. But for example, my father's parents were American communists. They were literal Jewish communists. They had cards. I don't know where the cards are, but they had, you know, card carrying communists. Did they carry the card? Did they keep it somewhere? All I know is from the 30s to the 70s, they had cards.

How did that not pass down to your? dad? That's a good question. I think that that's sort of the transition between the old left and the new left. You've probably heard the term red diaper baby. So, you know, you have the old left, which is kind of the Stalinist left, and that left kind of dies and runs out of gas in the 50s especially. Like, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of that is dying in like 1956, for example, with Hungary. So, you know, the Communist Party of USA is sort of the most. excited, most exciting and most fun in the 1930s. In the 1930s, you saw Oppenheimer, right? Oppenheimer is made from the most liberal biography of Oppenheimer available. Actually,

Oppenheimer himself probably was not only a communist, but actually the head of the communist cell in the Berkeley physics department. What's clear and what the movie makes clear to you to its credit is that everybody else is a communist. In fact, everybody in the 1930s, who's cool? is a communist. Dorothy Parker, communist, Charlie Chaplin, communist. Everybody's a communist. It's normal. And do you know what the word they used to describe? The word communist in the 1930s means party member. This is also what it meant in the Eastern Bloc. It's like calling yourself a hell's angel just because you ride a motorcycle. No, you're not a hell's angel unless you're a hell's angel, right? So you have to be a true kind ofist. You'll have to be a true, yeah, it's not just an expression

of opinion, it's actually a status. And if you're kicked out of the party in the 1930s, you lose all your friends. If you're a Hollywood screenwriter, you lose your job. It's like a closed union shop. Basically, communism in the 1930s in America is like, what if all the kids at the gifted school tried to take over the world? What benefits did they get from being the card carrying communist money? Your grandparents, what benefits did they?

My grandparents were, they moved up about four levels in the social high. because they were basically they were garment industry Jews you know they were they were Yiddish-speaking Jews they were these are shit tier Jews right you know they become communists and like all of their you know I'm just like as a kid I'm like why is my grandmother's best friend a distributor of Italian films right you know and so because she's a humble person she's it makes boiled chicken she's a school teacher in the New York City schools right you know but actually she has these tremendous tremendous intellectual pretensions.

You had this tremendous intellectual energy, and that led all of these people into the world of communism. Did you spend a lot of time with your grandma or grandpa? Some, but you know what the funny thing is? They would actually, the only reason I knew that they were actual literal communists was through my parents. They would, even as an adult, and not even knowing that I was a blogger or anything,

they were just, they were naturally, completely secretive about it. And do you know what word that was always used by these people to describe themselves and their supporters in general in the 1930s? Progressive. Yeah, makes sense. So they hit behind that word. Well, that word... It's a little safer than communism. Yeah. So the word progressive, basically you will find it used, for example, in the teens by Teddy Roosevelt and people like that. And Teddy Roosevelt is really more of an American fascist, almost in a way. He's certainly not a con. But for about 100 years, the word progressive has meant communist, right?

Okay. So mom and dad, grandpa, just stay on that for a second. When you're hanging out with them, are they teaching you? Curtis, when you grow up, these are the things that matter. Here's what you got. No, I think that they lost most of their energy by the 1970s. I think most of, and that energy had become, had fed into a more sort of diluted. It had become the new left.

And the new left, you know, the principal difference between the new left and the old left is that the old left is centralized in the Communist Party USA. The new left is decentralized. The new left has no center, nobody's in charge of it. And you're like, oh, well, you know, at least we're not Stalin is anymore. How did that happen? It happened because it was increasingly difficult. Well, it happened, first of all, because of the Cold War, because Stalin,

actually, you know, it was Stalin's decision to get divorced after the war. Like, the U.S. did not want to get divorced. Stalin made it very clear. During the war, American liberals and progressives had seen Russia's, their kind of strong right arm that would help them control the world, basically. So you see, you know, there's all this amazing pro-communist stuff during the 40s, films like Mission to Moscow and so forth, just insane Stalinist propaganda, totally flooding the American. American airways. Forty-five, Stalin decides, no, actually, I'm not your little dog. Who knows how this would have played out of FDR had and died? Stalin's like, no, I'm actually a peer. And that creates a great split in the American left, because the American left in 35, 36, had formed

this, what was called the Popular Front, where liberals allied with communists, or communists allied with liberals because it was always like, you know, the communists were sort of the more desirable party in that. It was like the liberals were always trying to get with the communists, basically, and the communists were like, oh, get away from the liberal, right? You'll see them do that now. And when that breaks, you get basically this breach in the American left, where the majority of American liberals and I mainly include people who are not working for the Soviet Union but sort of saw the Soviet Union as working for them, which was sort of the view at the top of the Roosevelt administration. Stalin decisively breaks that myth and causes these American liberals to realize, oh, we're not

creating one progressive world government under the United Nations. We have two competing progressive world empires. These empires would still go after like the old British and French world. They would, you know, for example, in 56, the U.S. and the USSR are aligned against Britain and France in the Suez crisis, right? So there's still like, you know, this kind of deep ideological tie between the two, and that tie goes all the way from 1917 to 1989. So for example, in the 80s, there's this thing where... 17 to 89? Yeah. the whole life of the Soviet Union, it has very complicated, deep relationships with the American left,

probably too deep to go into here. But here's an example of this. So in, I think it was 84, this was revealed only after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 84, Teddy Kennedy sends his basically chief conciliary, John Tunney, secretly to Moscow to talk with Andropov about their, strategy in the 84 election, in which Teddy Kennedy didn't end up running. I think it was 84. It could have been 80. I think it was 84.

So you have all of these like deep, deep, deep, deep, see? You know, you have all of these... Tony, a former U.S. Center, California, close front of Teddy Kennedy is known for making confidential trips to Moscow in the 1880s. 1980s.

A very detailed top secret KGB memoranda published in 92, which revealed that Tony served as a back channel to Soviet officials. visit, Ted Kennedy primarily, primarily challenged to challenge Carter. Tony traveled to Moscow to devise a strategy to counter what Kennedy perceived as Carter's excessive anti-Soviet stance. You got to be kidding me.

It's right there on the screen, right? You know, and this is Wikipedia. He stayed in politics 40 years and nothing happened to him. Yeah, yeah. So like the relationship between the U.S. and the U.S.S.S.R is, it's not at all like the relationship between the U.S. and Hitler. It's not, it's like the relationship between the Cold War is sort of like, imagine you're a parent, you have a teenager, I have a couple of teenagers, and sometimes teenagers turn out bad, you know, they get into heroin, they start stealing money

from your purse, you know, they do awful, awful things. But it's not like a stranger broken to your house and stole money out of your wife's purse, you know, and so there's always this kind of feeling of like a deep family tie there, which I think is something that they tried very hard to continue, you know, because there was this always this basically, for all of the 20th century, you had this idea that there were two lefts. You know how there's two lefts, you know, the communists and the liberals, and if you call a liberal a communist, you know, it's the worst thing in the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you look at basically the left now and you're just like, come on, don't, you're just yanking my chain. The idea that there's two lefts today,

like, you're just yanking my chain. There's not two lefts. And, you know, this, of course, is first kind of recognized by the first, I mean, really the first new left president is Carter. But, you know, the first really acknowledged new left president is Obama. And so, again, with Obama, you're probably familiar being a, you know, conservative podcast. You're probably familiar with some of the, you know, the interesting stories around the mysterious past of Mr. Barack Obama. And I think most of those stories are... Which one's most mysterious to you? I've heard many of them, but you're more well read on this topic.

I think that generally speaking, I think just the important fact at, I think his connection with Baylorers, for example, is completely real. I think that, but more generally you can step back and say Barack Obama is a man of the new left. He's a new leftist. When you use the word new left, the dictionary definition should point to Barack Obama. on. Right. And the connections between the new left and the old left, I think, are very interesting. First of all, you see this word progressive, you know, being basically continually used. It's not a coincidence, right?

And it's like when people, when progressives today use the word progressive, I would say no more than 5% of them know that it is, is or ever was in any sense a euphemism for communist. They have no idea. They're like, you know, in New Mexico, one of the things that, you know, in the wild experience of Spanish colonization, a lot of Jews and conversos from Spain fled to the new world. So there are these populations of conversos in New Mexico, like old Spanish, not, you know, and they do strange things with candles and napkins, and they have no idea why. They don't know that they're Jews, right? And so in a way, that's kind of the state of the new left. don't know that they're communists. They don't understand that this is completely their heritage and that when and yet when you look at it, you see it all over the place. The new left doesn't know their communists? They sort of do and they sort of don't. Like AOC, Mamdani, Obama. They know they, they sort of,

they see it from the inside in a way and so they, they, they perceive themselves in sort of in opposition to liberals and they'd basically be like, oh no, we're not Stalinists. Like Stalinists are like, Stahl, you know, there's a lot of, if you know, the logical fallacy, no true Scotsman, you know, you basically get, you know, real communism has never been tried, you know, Stalin actually betrayed communism, you know, here's another fun story that your, your researchers can bring up easily. Do you know the name's Stanley Levison? No. So Stanley Levison was until 1956, I think he was not, it was not an official title, but he was

basically the CFO of the Communist Party USA. He was kind of ran its financial operations. And in 56 or 55, really, he realizes that the writing is on the wall for being a minion of Stalin. It's like McCarthyism has happened. It's like, you know, it's just Hungary has happened. Like, it's just not, it's not the vibe. It's not the thing.

So Leveson does this interesting thing where he decides to revive a cause of the Communist Party from the 1930s. And he finds a black minister with a somewhat dodgy PhD and creates a movement and an organization and writes all of his speeches and manages his whole organization. Absolutely. This organization is called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The preacher is Martin Luther King. And the funniest thing, here's a fun thing that you can do with Wikipedia. If you go to Stanley Levison's page, you will see that it says that Stanley Levison was influential in creating the SCLC. Go to the SCLC's page.

No mention. Nothing. He's not on the page. He's not on the page. And so, like, this is the... That was instrumental in all the activities at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization established by Dr. King and other Southern black preachers to further the cause of civil rights. He had initially been introduced.

Go to the SCLC page. Go to the SCLC. Search for Levison. Why not? Man, you know, like, you've seen the Trubon Show. You're like, what does that car come around every hour, you know? So, but what does this mean to a guy like you? How do you process this information?

So did they use? Did they use MLK to? It's, no, it's just that it's like, you know, when you see an organization, you know, government and non-government, you know, you can never be sure that it is what it says it is. And so, you know, basically for, you know, even now, like, it's like we accept all these sort of lies without question. We see a politician reading his speech and we're like, well, we didn't know he, he didn't really write that speech. Maybe he helped edit it a little bit. Maybe he marked it up. But he's reading someone else's speech.

You know. You're saying I have a dream was written by him? No, no, no, no, no, he didn't write his own speeches. This is common, this is well-known history. So I have a dream speech wasn't written by Martin. Luther King. No, he didn't write his own speeches. He might have written a letter from a Birmingham jail because he was actually in the Birmingham jail, but I'm not, you know, completely confident of that. If he wrote letter from a Birmingham jail, he was plagiarizing his own speech writers. Stanley was one of the speechwriters. Yes. Go back, Rob, on the previous, go back one page on the, oh, right there. Martinard's, I have a dream speech, but it was collaborative effort on key contributions from his lawyer on speechwriters, Clarence B. Jones, businessman Stanley Levison. businessman Stanley Levincent. Businessmen, not communist, and other advisors

who drafted provided input in King himself. I think Jones is also a communist. But, you know, I don't know the first. I just want to read you one more thing because while you were speaking, I read this one part. Go back on the previous page. Go to the RFK side. It's like five sentences from the bottom.

In 1963, following the revelation of Dr. King's circle, that Attorney General Bobby Kent, R.F. Kennedy, and then John F. Kennedy had pressured Dr. King in person to break with Levinson and Jack O'Dell. Also communist? Also communist? Yeah. But Levinson, Leveson continued to advise Dr. King privately until Dr. King's assassination

in April of 68 and afterwards, Levinson continued to work with Dr. King's wife, Coretta Scott King, the poor people's campaign in D.C. That took place from May 12th, too. Of course, he's actually the CEO, right? You know, and like he's actually the CEO, right? So MLK's communist ties to Leveson. Yeah. It was, you know, the thing is, if you pull back to the bigger picture, basically, even the term civil rights,

so basically what you had was in the 30s with cases like, for example, the Scottsboro Boys, which were, was George Floyd in the 1930s, you know, you had this basically black nationalism and black liberation, huge, huge cause of the Communist Party in the 20s and 30s. if you look up the phrase of self-determination in the black belt, for example. That's a 1920s era communist slogan. And they actually imagined having black SSRs in, like, Alabama, like Soviets, actually parts of the Soviet Union. And like, you know, because the Soviet Union was intended to be a world government, of course, right? You know, and it wasn't Russian. It was started in Russia.

and, you know, not really by Russians either, right? And so you have all of these things that are basically, you know, 20th century stories, which when you look at them with a 21st century historical view and you're trying to find the reality rather than the narrative, you basically see that the reality is like very, very, very, different from the narrative. It's like FDR being in a wheelchair. So what Levison was doing was simply basically taking a Communist Party initiative from the 20s and 30s and laundering it as what we now call the civil rights movement. Right. So completely just no question of this history. It's like all the

details are kind of readily acknowledged. If you look at like David Garrow's King biography, you know, it's all going to be in there, right? You know, and you can actually tell the truth about it now. Maybe not quite in the way that I'm telling it, because I'm telling it in a way that makes it sensational because I believe it actually is sensational, right? And it's kind of amazing what happened here. It's kind of wild, and it's sort of like,

of course, when we see these other regimes of the 20th century, we sort of expect them to be Orwellian, and we expect people to not understand what's going on in their own country. But, like, you know, the reality is, like, what is America in the 1960s? It's basically three TV stations, ABC, CBS, and NBC, plus for the ruin class NPR and PBS. And it is a very controlled, very tightly organized broadcast media environment. If you look at basically during both World Wars, you'll see what we call, and conservatives called MSM, is actually a government agency.

So in World War II, it's the Office of War Information, OWI. OWI is basically the mainstream media as a government agency. World War I, it's the Committee on Public Information, the CPI. Insane wild propaganda. You ever take a look at like World War I propaganda, and you're just like, this is propaganda for 11-year-olds. Like this is incredibly simplistic, incredibly crude. like, why are we fighting in Germany?

The hun is going to come rape your sister with his spiked helmet, right? And it's like you look at the reality of the diplomatic, you know, machinations, you know, behind that, which are easily as complicated as anything going on in Washington today. And you're just like, actually,

this is for children. And so, in a way, waking up from this kind of this dream. How do you, though? How do you wake up from the dream? I mean, to the average person, I'm being serious with you because to the app. So you're telling me in 1917 to 89, a Teddy Kennedy who wants to run for office against Jimmy Carter has to send the guy, okay, to Russia.

Yeah, to meet with them and say he is more pro-Soviet than Carter for what? Hey, help him become a president? Sure. Why would you want to? So does that mean you needed Russia to get elected at that time? that you needed Russia to get elected, but it was more like we're going to kind of coordinate our efforts so that things sort of look good on all sides. Who cares, so why do I need Russia? So if you're talking about election interference, I mean,

that's like... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a different, that's a different world. But that's truly Russian election interference. It's more that you still had a sense in the new left of the 80s. Consider, for example, the nuclear freeze movement from back then. Remember that, you know, maybe you're about to see, born in the 70s? Like, 78, yeah. Yeah, 73. So, you know, if you remember sort of the peace movement of the 1980s, like, actually

Russia is quite deeply involved in that. They're still in the habit in the 80s of giving basically bunches of money to left-wing movements all around the planet, certainly including the U.S. Now, yeah, is this sort of a little shadow of the way it used to be? It's a shadow of the way it used to be because, before the Cold War, like, just completely crazy stuff went on. You know, I'm, I mean, completely. But, like, you go, you know, all the way back to the past,

and you find, like, you go all the way back to 1917, and you find very deep ties between American progressive elements and the early USSR, right? Again, completely. So, for example, if you, this was one of my little, little red pills. If you look at the Russian Civil War, for example, today's historians will tell you, without blinking an eye, that the U.S. sided with the white Russians, the anti-communists, and the Russian Civil War. Technically, this is true. All the events on the ground were as such.

In fact, however, the strategy certainly of Wilson is actually to prevent the British and the French from aiding the whites. in some ways he has to do this by actually he actually sends troops but the troops are not there to help defeat the Bolsheviks they're actually there to sandbag any attempt to defeat the Bolsheviks so they're sort of kept sort of too weak it's like a bay of pigs type thing in a way and and if you look at the relationship between Wilson and Lenin you notice something very interesting about that which is that there's a lot of vituperation coming from especially Lenin to Wilson. Wilson is always stretching out his hand to Lenin and Lenin is always slapping it away. And you're like, wow, these fanatical Russians just hate America or something like that. Well,

you know, point seven of the 14 points is basically hands off the Bolsheviks. You know, Wilson is a revolutionary world leader. He's trying to revolutionize the world. He has this conflict. There's a sort of division in American socialism between Wilson and Debs. And basically Deb's, the IWW leader is the kind of candidate of all the cool kids. And all the cool kids really, really love the Russian Revolution. Or if you've heard of like John Reed, for example, you know, an excellent film about this period about early American communism is a film called Reds. It was made in the 1980s. It has got Jack Nicholson in it.

It has everyone is in it. Warren Betty is in it? Warren Beatty is playing John Reed. And John Reed is the only American... Produce and directed by Warren Betty. John Reed, who Warren Beatty is playing, is the only American buried in the wall of the Kremlin. Right.

So, you know, the level to which basically communism did not come out of Russia, communism came to Russia. And it came to Russia through people like John Reed. And, you know, what happens, basically, as soon as the Russian Revolution happens is it sort of breaks into these two sides, the kind of liberal Kerenzky side and the radical Lenin side. And Lenin is sexy. Who saw this and said we can run with these ideas? American progressives basically were like, so there's something called the Red Cross mission to Russia, which was basically the American embassy to the Bolsheviks. And this...

Can you pull up Red Cross mission to Russia? This was actually really the Wall Street mission to Russia. And they were working quite closely. I mean, at the time, the business of... Yeah, this is kind of a cover story. You know, at the time, the business of sponsoring revolutions abroad was very, very lucrative. Because this is kind of a 19th century thing.

You kind of, this is the British perfected this. You like sponsored the revolution, and then you support the revolutionaries, and the revolutionaries give you big, big, big, big contracts, right? And so all through the 20s, even when the U.S. did not recognize Russia, and it was almost, I don't know the legalities, but it was quasi illegal to deal with Russia. Huge amounts of American investment is rushing into Russia. So you look, for example, at someone like Averill Haram, one of the titans of the mid-century diplomatic establishment.

He's later U.S.S. ambassador to Russia and, of course, becomes a Cold War figure. Averill Harriman is the son of Edward Harriman, a huge railroad tycoon. You wouldn't expect him to be a Bolshevik. And yet Averill Harriman is given, I believe, by Stalin, huge manganese concessions in Soviet Georgia in the 1920s. And so there's all of this actually like really deep involvement there between the, if you search for manganese, it might be there. Mangonese. Mangonies. M-A-N-G.

M-A-N-G. But it might not. Magnetons. Yeah. Stalin later takes it back from them. But like the, yeah, you see, you don't expect to see that, right? You know, Stalin later takes it back from him, but this didn't bother them too much. If you look at the relationship between Wilson and Lenin, you know what it's like, you know.

Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, 1917, you're going back to it. Woodrow Wilson going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson. If you rearrange actually the name of your podcast from PBD to BPD, you know, there's a certain kind of relationship that you have with a person with borderline personality disorder, right? and the BPD girl, right? Lennon is the BPD girl. Wilson is the like hopeless schlub who like wants to date Lennon. And, you know, Lenin will be like, lick my boot, you know, and Wilson will bend down and industriously lick Lenin's boot.

And Lennon will be like, you didn't even lick the bottom part. That's the part that gets dirty. What the hell? You must hate me, right? You know, that was kind of the vibe. So Lennon controlled Wilson? No, controlled. Lennon manipulates.

it was more like basically the BPD bitch isn't in charge of you sorry if you're using that word sure She's not in charge of you she just manages to manipulate you and so Wilson for example is a major major influence in making sure the British and the French Don't wipe out the USSR after World War I which they have every inclination and every power to do right and so the USSR in a way starts its life as an American protectorate in a way that is really, really, really, really hidden from Americans then and even now. So, like, actually, this is a very, very deep and complicated relationship. It is funky. It is not at all simple. And the Cold War interpretation of it sort of simplifies it in a way.

Even if you look at 1950s McCarthyist anti-communists, are they right? Yeah, they're right, but they're also wrong. They're right, in a sense, because they're right that, wow, we had this really relationship with the USSR that's like really strange. But they interpret this relationship as kind of, they interpret it in this kind of nativist way. Like the thing about the Russians is that they're foreign. They're weird and foreign. and you can see this in all the Russian collusion stuff. They're like foreigners or, you know,

contaminating our weather supply or something, something, or precious bodily fluids. You know, in fact, you know, there are certainly Americans who are pawns of the Soviet Union in this period, but the most influential liberal Americans are not, do not see themselves as working for the Soviet Union. They would have been utterly baffled by the idea

that they were working for the Soviet Union. Union, they saw the Soviet Union as working for them. That is a completely, completely, that is also a heinous relationship, considering the crimes of the Soviet Union, which are really at their worst in the 1930s when the Soviet Union is most popular in America. But that is a very different relationship. So, you know, for example, one of my historical theses that I'm pretty sure of, but that can't probably really be proved is I think FDR was completely knowledgeable about what Al Jairis was doing. Al Jus was not a spy. He was not a traitor. He was a back channel. And, you know, to basically someone like Alger Hiss in Washington in, say, 1942, you know, would basically be like, look,

we share all of our intelligence with the British, but not with the Russians. You know, but the Russians are actually a progressive power like us, whereas the British are stuck in the mode imperialists, you know, why shouldn't we be working more closely with the Soviets? And then the Soviets would basically do this BPD thing where, you know, so for example, there's something called the Doolittle Raid in early in World War II where it's kind of America's 9-11, but in reverse, we kind of, we can't really attack Japan at this point. We mount the stunt where we're going to basically fly American bombers off of carriers, land-based bombers off of carriers on a one-way trip to just drop some bombs on Tokyo somewhere somehow, just kill some Japanese, and they're

going to land in China. And it was actually kind of a success in a way, but some of these aircraft, they don't land in China, they wind up in the Soviet Union, which at the same time is fighting, you know, the axis at the same time with us. What happens to those pilots, they're imprisoned, they're interned because, you know, the USSR is like, well, we're neutral with respect to Japan. You know, we can't, you know. So actually, like, at the same time as the U.S. is, like, supplying Stalin with all of this stuff, Stalin is imprisoning Americans, right? Again, this is sort of, you know, like characteristic of this kind of dysfunctional relationship

where you treat her like a princess and she treats you like a slave, right? you know and and so that sort of Wilson-Lennon relationship is duplicated between FDR and Stahl. How did Wilson get inspired by Lennel? Like what happened? What was a single event? Is there an event or no? So American socialism and the American leftism is older than the USSR, you know.

And so the idea that basically this is this kind of Russian planted seed in our society that like can be eliminated by sort of, you know, spraying some. kind of pesticide that kills all foreigners or something is not really accurate. Actually, we inspired Russia more than day inspired us. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. And where does ROG leftist, progressive, communist ideas come from? Does it go back down to a single individual? No, no. It's actually a very deep, you know, it's a very deep sort of cultural trope in American history. Let me give you, let me walk through. Here's, here's, since you have some nice research on the screen. We can follow along with this. You know, here's, leftism is the real

American tradition. America is and always has been a leftist country. I know that this is very difficult for conservatives to accept. It is unfortunately true. So, for example, let's consider Barack Obama. We're going to trace Barack Obama's ideas or ideas and origins back. So who is Barack Obama's a mentor. Well, that's a little bit disputed. We've hit a couple names. Yes, but you might think of Bill Ayers. Sure. And I think that's a very legitimate connection. They were certainly close, arguably before it was said that they were close. I would have thought about Frank Marshall Davis. Yeah, yeah, that's his, that's his, probably his dad actually, who's also, I mean, they look like. If you, if you basically take Frank

Marshall Davis and Stanley N. Dunham, face and morph them together. It looks like Barack Obama. This is another thing. If I, if, you know, let's let's go full berther for a moment. Can we go full birth? Obviously, he was not born in Kenya. That's ridiculous. That would have never happened at this time. What I believe happened was that basically, um, um, um, um, um, Stanley Dunham's, uh, black, Dunham is also a communist. His black communist pornographer friend knocks up his teenage daughter and the responses, and this is, was kind of a normal thing for 1960. The response is, let's find an African exchange student who can pretend to be the real father. Because actually, my black communist pornographer friend

knocked up my daughter is not acceptable in any way, shape, or form in 1960. Is that what you're saying happened? That's, I'm pretty sure what happened. And that explains just like, it explains a complete lack of a relationship between Barack Obama and Senior and Stanley N. Dunham. It explains Barack Obama's relationship with the guy he calls pop. It explains like, you know, a zillion things. And it's just, it's actually kind of banal. What's actually not banal is that I think they got communists working in the state government in Hawaii to kind of forge the documentation a little bit, which is why you had that whole foo for all with the birth certificate, which by the way, we still have not seen. Which, by the way, I want to tell you some,

A crazy story. My graphic designer in my company, I was in Woodland Hills, California. You know Woodland Hills, California. You may know Woodland Hills. Die-hard Obama guy. Yeah. Armenian guy grew up in Venezuela, a liberal family, so he's supporter of it. Remember the day the White House dropped the birth certificate on their website?

Mm-hmm. I do. He calls me, he says, can you come into my office? I said, what's up? He says, this is not a... He says, this is not a birth certificate. I said, what do you mean? He says, Pat, let me show you.

He gets on there. He says, this is all layered. Yeah. So he himself, who's a pro-Mama guy. They left the layers in the file. They left the layers in the file, right? And the thing is actually Barack Obama is perfectly eligible to be president under this theory, right? You know, he was born to two American parents, Stanley N. Dunham and Frank Marshall Davis.

He was born absolutely no question in America, probably in Seattle. And then they basically went for this ridiculous foo for awe to get a black exchange student to pretend to be his father. Instead, it was a what? It was a porn. It was Frank Marshall Davis. Frank Marshall Davis is Barack Obama's father. Yeah.

Your opinion. That's my opinion. That's my opinion. Who else has that position? You'll see. It's out there on the internet. It's, well, dreams from my real father, I think, is the, There's a video on it.

You know, it's funny because Obama was visiting, when he was president, he was visiting a genomics company in California that I knew the founder of. And I was like, get a glass, get a drinking glass, get a glass, and we'll find this out. Because he doesn't look anything like Barack Obama Sr. Pull up a picture of Barack Obama Sr. Nothing. Nothing like him. Nothing like him.

Right. you know and they're black that's clearly nothing like him right you know and and so like this is a you know nobody thought at the time this boy is going to grow up to be president people are just like you know the word bastard still had an impact then and nobody wanted this kid to grow up with the real story of how this happened and so they came up with this bullshit right you know and and like that's a sort of it's a thing like the Stanley Levison thing thing where you're just like, you could call it a conspiracy theory, but it's actually a pretty banal thing to do at that time. It's actually pretty normal. It would be very weird now.

Nobody would do anything like that. Let's go back to it. So what did the original left? So, okay, we're going back from Barack Obama. You go back to Bill Ayers. Now, Bill Ayers was the head of what organization? Which one? The Weather Underground, right? The Weatherman. Yes, yes. Right. So, very glamorous, very, you saw this, maybe you saw the awful, that awful Paul Thomas Anderson film, one battle after another, you know. I got a lot of movies to watch. You don't want to watch. I definitely have to watch John Reed the Red movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Reds, absolutely.

No, no, you know, oh, my God, this movie is so, it's like this Antifa glorification movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. it's like I wrote a review of it for The Spectator that was like this may be the worst movie ever made. Which one is this? The latest movie that just came? Oh, you can't watch it for the first. It's all about illegal immigration or something. Is that the one you're talking about? Oh, my God. Oh, it's called one of his worst movies of all time. It is one of the first three minutes. He shut it down. It may be one of the worst movies of all time. Really? It is artistically bad. It is dramatically bad. It is aesthetically bad. And it is morally very bad.

It's got Sean Penn in it. It's got. Benicio del Toro. Oh, yeah. No, the acting is amazing. I mean, with some exceptions. But no, so, oh, all right, so you go back to the weathermen. The weathermen are glamorous. You hear about them, you know, you're like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn.

Like, you know, Bernardine Dorn is hot, right? You know, they're like, they're, these are princelings. These are, you know. So, and in fact, you know who Bill Ayers' his father was. Thomas Ayers and he was the CEO of Consolidated Edison. Okay. So this is a rich kid. This is like a, you know, major league rich kid.

But let's go back to the Weathermen. So the Weathermen are a splinter faction of a group called Students for Democratic Society, SDS, which you've probably heard of. And what's good? I've heard of students for a Democratic society. Okay. Now, SDS is actually the youth wing. of an organization, which we're going to get successively cooler names here. Are you ready for some cooler names? So the SDS is originally the youth wing of something called the League for Industrial Democracy.

Nice. Capitalism and Socialism. League for Industrial Democracy. Great name. Very cool name. Could be a band. You know, could be a band. League for Industrial Democracy. Lid. And it basically changes its name from some.

something called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which you'll see up there. And if you click on the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Now we're in 1905. Now we're in 1905. No, Moscow. Zahar is still on his throne. Yep. Zara is still on his throne.

Now, if you look at the founders of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, you'll see some names that you might recognize, like Upton Sinclair or Jack London. You've probably heard of Jack London, right? You know, this is, again, this is like really deep in the mainstream. This is not, you know, there, Fount in Sinclair, Walter Lippman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London. You've heard of all these people, right? These are significant Americans, and this is not coming from the KGB. Okay, so actually, you know, these are patrician, these are top-tier Americans, right?

So if you, one of the things I discovered while looking at this is that you can go even farther back with this. Because one of the founders of the ISS is a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Now, this is not a name you're going to know. Higginson is chiefly known as the guy who discovered Emily Dickinson. That's his chief claim to fame. It's worthy claim to fame. But he's also, when the ISS is founded, he's like the old guy in the room. You know, you'll go to these young revolutionary things.

I'm becoming the old guy in the room, right? You know, all these kids, right? You know, and like, you know, my audience base is heavily under 30, right? So you'll, because those are the radicals, right, always. But there's always like an old guy in the room. So the old guy in the room, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, what's interesting is that he was part of an earlier era when he was young. He was part of an earlier era of American radicalism. He was in fact a financier of terrorism.

He was. He was actually one of the supporters of the leading American terrorist of the period. And he was a member of a group, I don't know if they called themselves this, but they became called that. Brace yourself for a serious comic book name, The Secret Six. The Secret Six. The Secret Six. All right. All right.

All right. You know, you're like, is this a real thing? thing is this a real thing who's the secret six who were the secret six 1859 they were the equivalent of like basically wealthy Saudis who funded Osama what John Brown you've heard of John Brown course John Brown but not the other names that I'm looking at it but like you know let's see who looks like an evil guy he was a psycho holy he was a complete and total psycho. And so, you know, one of the names of the leading antifa organizations is the John Brown Gun Club. So we're really dealing with something you cannot find any living conservative

tradition in America with this kind of lineage. But if you go back, if I read that, go back to what you just said. It doesn't sound. So an evangelical Christian of a strong religious conviction, Brown was profoundly influenced by the Puritan fate of his upbringing. He believed that he was an instrument of God, race to strike the death blow to slavery in the U.S. That doesn't sound like a bad person, a sacred obligation. Brown was leading the exponent of violence in the American abolitionist, abolished movement, believing it was necessary to enslave her after decades of peace. So he was previously known for what's called the Potawatomi Massacre, where he was in Kansas,

where a lot of this trouble was happening. And he just basically, you know, like drags people out of their house with swords and Not that Harper's Ferry was exactly a success either. And so, you know, he's basically, if you look at the abolitionists in the run-up to the Civil War, they look very, very modern. So if you're looking at the Republicans in the world of Abraham Lincoln, there are actually two very different sort of directions that come together in the Republican Party. They're the abolitionists and the anti-slavery men. And this sounds like you're describing the same thing, right? In fact, it's totally different.

This is why the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, comes so late in the war, and it has to pretend to be a military measure. Because actually, if you went into a bar in Richmond in 1861, and someone asked you to explain the war, And you said, this war is a holy crusade by the abolitionist north to abolish slavery in the south. They would clap you on the back and buy you another beer. If you said that in Chicago, they'd kick your ass.

Right. So the anti-slavery men, the first Republican presidential candidate is John C. Fremont, which a lot of, you know, who also conquered California, so a lot of stuff is named for him. There's a town of Fremont near where I live. Fremont's slogan was Fremend, Free Soif you were a free soiler in the web. And free soil, Fremont. Yes, very, very catchy. So what free soil meant was that basically slaves should not be allowed in the territories that were not incorporated as states.

And you're like, well, you're against slavery. We're all against slavery. You're right. You know, actually, the free soil men had a very specific point. They didn't like slavery because they didn't like black people. They were actually, and the abolitionist movement had many tropies. of sort of a modern perspective on race. But the anti-slavery men were a hardcore racist.

So, for example, Oregon, you might not know this. Oregon, until I believe the 1970s, it was obviously a dead letter, prohibited black people from entering the state of Oregon. 1970, just 50 some years ago. Yeah, yeah. In the 1970, I forget when it was actually taken out of the Constitution. Oregon was never like, you know, obviously, never a Confederate state. There was never any Confederate Oregon.

Yeah, you're right. Ban black people from entering the state were part of history long before. Related racist language in the state. I'm a little wrong on the dates. Related racist language in the state constitution remained until 2002. Right? So, and this is because of basically the anti-slavery man heritage, the Western Republicans were anti-slavery, the chic people in Boston were abolitionists. And they managed to form this coalition, which was the coalition of Lincoln. But if you look at the way Puritans and abolitionists thought very, very, very similar to liberals today. Very similar kind of mindset, similar kind

of messianic, you know, and they had all kinds of causes, you know, abolitionism was just one of them. Prohibition was another huge cause of these same people, right? And, and, and, you And so you kind of recognize when you learn to basically, you know, think about Harvard for a moment. In a way, Harvard has been the leading institution in American intellectual life for literally almost 400 years. It was founded in 1636. If you look at basically what are the ideas of Harvard at date D, you are going to find them running America at date D plus 10 years, D plus 50 years, D plus 100 years. Right. And so Harvard was founded as a Puritan institution. Obviously, it was a Puritan college for ministers. Actually, I learned this. I did a debate at Harvard about six months ago with a professor there.

And for this, I boned up on the history and I discovered that Harvard is actually somewhat implicated in the Salem witch craze. What did they say when he brought that up? They didn't know anything about it. She didn't know anything about it. the the um but you know so you have this sort of puritan religion of harvard that basically you can watch sort of morph over time from like puritanism into like pure hippieism and it like there's never a break in that there's never no foreign army ever comes and takes over harvard like it's always sort of this process of a kind of internal becoming really and you can see how puritanism in the 17th century becomes basically American progressive communism in the 20th and even 21st centuries.

And so to understand history in this way as a conservative, you're just like, wait a second, America for its entire life has been on the left side of the political spectrum. So, for example, America is founded by these Puritan settlers, and the Puritans are, of course, Calvinists. and you can find actually in a way the first woke regime in history was actually the strange regime of Edward the seventh. No, the sixth, six or the seventh? Maybe the sixth. I think the sixth.

Who is basically this boy king who comes after Henry the eighth and before Bloody Mary. No, Edward the sixth, sorry. And real brainfart. So basically, you know, Henry VIII has this, of course, religious revolution where he breaks with Rome for various personal and political reasons. But he's not quite part of the, like, extreme left wing. And I think you can really use this term at this time, kind of Protestant thing that's going on in Europe. But of course, he's influenced by this sort of whole Gutenberg revolution.

revolution in thinking. And after he dies, his son, who is sickly and young, is basically tutored by these radical Protestants who basically create this kind of proto-Puritan regime in England that lasts only for a few years because Edward the Six dies young and is replaced by Mary Tudor who tries to return the country to Catholicism. She also died somewhat prematurely, and then you have the Elizabethan world. Point is, You can connect basically in this sort of continuous ideological and cultural thread. You can go all the way back to 16th century England from Barack Obama. You can connect the abolitionists to the Puritans.

You can connect the Puritans to the tutors. And like this is not, you know, this is actually just normal history. It's the way things work, right? It's not particularly crazy. But the thing is, if you situate yourself properly in history in this way, you know, you sort of realize that, like, for example, if you're like a conservative, which you sort of find yourself trying to restore as like kind of previous generations of, you know how many, many more people move from being liberal to conservative than the other direction? And the people who will move in the other direction. Every state plus minus was more red 2024, every county, every state. But I'm thinking more of like, yeah, there's that, but I'm thinking more of like intellectuals,

like, you know, pundits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You'll see pundits who start off on the left and move over to the right in their lifetime all over the place, all over history. Sure, you know. Burke, for example, like the idol of American conservatives, he's a liberal in the 1770s, right? But that does kind of make sense You're young, you're being brainwashed by the teachers And you're just like getting into like reality

Life hasn't happened yet You haven't paid taxes And then if you look at the people that move from conservative to liberal They're really problematic people They're people with like serious Who are the biggest names by the way David Brock

Who else? Of Media Matters Oh media matters He moved from the right to the left Oh yeah David Brock David Brock got his start Writing hit pieces on Hillary Clinton But what is the profile of people?

that move from the right to the left. They're psychopaths. Really? Tell me why. Because they're like, because to go from left to right is a kind of waking up to reality. But actually the idea of like reversing that process and putting yourself to sleep and saying,

you know, it's like, you know what those people are like, they're like the guy in the Matrix who wants the juicy stuff. You know, there's a lot of that, basically, in those people. They're like, oh, but I don't go with a nice juicy steak, right? I know it's not real, but I'll eat it. And David Brock has had a, you know, pretty impressive career as a left-wing hitman, right? You know, and before that, he had a reasonably impressive career as a right-wing hitman.

But he is actually, like, you know, just a man completely... First time I learned about Media Matters. We had an event. And at this event, we're having Jordan Peterson, Kobe Bowdo. Bryant, Billy Bean, George Bush. This is eight years ago, seven years ago. Yeah. Seems like a different world, doesn't it? It's a different world. And then the, the both Bush's team and Kobe said, when we go to events, you're going to get some hate coming your way. We're like, who's going to say anything? Like we're bringing Kobe because he's greatness

on the Birmingham, you know, George, because president and we're bringing Peterson for debate. And then Billy Bean, he's a baseball guy, I like him. Media matters rights a hit piece on us. and then they reach out to me and they say, look, we just want you know we're sorry that you're going through this. I'm like, are you guys good with it? Because I'm good with them. No, we're good with it.

We ended up having the best event ever in 2018, 2019. So that's the first time I learn about how good they can be by going out there and do it. But that's interesting to say when you go from right to left, I wonder how much of it is then being offended. I wonder how much of it is, you know, promised a job or a position

that the other side didn't do it and say, I'm going to go to the other. other side. I wonder what the patterns are because it can't be values. Yeah, it's not a good faith. Whatever it is, it's not in good faith. It's a, it's just, it's a career move. It's a like, you know, and it's a career move and it often comes out of like a kind of personality disorder. I think, you know, like David Brock's a weird guy, right? You know, it's pull him up. Can you pull up David Brock? You said he's a weird guy? He's a weird guy. And he went from a conservative, writing hit pieces on Hillary Clinton. Yeah. To go into the other side.

Liberal political on Sunday has been at times most influential operatives in the Democratic Party. No. Arizona led to Paulo Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. Brock began his crucial. A right-wing investigator reporter from 1990s. He wrote the book, Real Anita Hill and Trooper Gate story. And aligning himself with the Democratic Party, he switched with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. He found a media matter is a non-prudderative organization, described progressive.

Pull up a picture. Pull up a piece. He's a weird looking guy. Yeah. Physio. I'm a strong believer in physiognomy. Is he married? Is he straight?

I think he's gay. He is? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's look at him. Let's let's let's. I don't know what he looks like. Go to images.

That's the look of somebody that would go from the right to the left. You look like that. That's the look like that. You look like a child molester, basically. Yeah. And, oh, great. Now I've made some enemies. But, but, but yeah, you know, it's, it's like, look at those eyes, man.

You know, it's like, it's like, Like the, you know how, you know how those crazy women in England who like slept with a thousand guys in a day or whatever? They have these dead eyes. Yes. And all like horrors and porn stars have like dead eyes. It's horrifying. Like. He's got dead eyes. He's got dead eyes.

He looks like the guy from Lawless, the movie. I don't know if you've seen Lawless. That's a movie you got to watch. I'm making one movie recommendation in return because I got 28 movies I got to go watch after talking to you. But in Lawless, the evil guy. Can you pull up lawless villain? Put lawless movie villain. Lawless movie villain.

Go to images. He's got, you know, that look. Zoom in. Zoom into that look. Yeah, he just doesn't care. Yeah, he's like he could care less. With the last hour we got together, I want to talk to you about a couple things,

especially with the whole time that's going on right now. I'm curious to know what to say about this. One, monarchy, democracy. Let's just case study. I pulled it up and I kind of went up through a couple different things. When we looked at monarchies and democracy, the longest lasting democracy was U.S. 238, and it was Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, you know, Luxembourg, Belgium, a couple of these guys. And then when you go up and pull up longest lasted monarchies, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, UK, Morocco.

I kind of brought it up a little bit earlier. Why do monarchies outlast democracies? Well, either I would say the question is more why is monarchy almost the use. universal form of political organization found throughout history, even in cultures that have no connection with each other. So, for example, when the conquistadors, who are working for monarchy, come to South America, they find the Aztecs, they find the Incas. They don't find any hippie tribes.

Nobody's ever found any hippie tribes. And, you know, the, well, there's one interesting exception, actually. But they basically find, you know, if you go back all the way to the chimpanzee, you will find that our ancestors for many, many millions of years have been living in small groups with individual leaders. Chimpanzees, you know, have kings. They sometimes have a little triumvirate or whatever, but that's not really stable. They have, you know, chimp kings.

Actually, and being the chimp king is definitely the way to pass your jeans on. as a chimpanzee. They make war. People were very surprised to find, you know, these things. And, you know, everyone in the 1960s and 70s wanted to believe that we were descended from, you know, millions of years of hippies. And it was a big shock to found that even chimpanzees make war. And they make war in a very, very ugly way. Right. So you have this sort of this form, which is really the universal form of human governance historically. But it's more than the universal form historically. It's also when you look at basically any

effective organization, whether that's a company, whether it's a military, whether it's a movie, you've probably heard of the tour theory of movies. Imagine a film directed by a committee. You're just like,

you know, even in a restaurant, you have a chef, right? And so this structure of basically you know, the sort of the pyramid-shaped command structure, is something that recurs over and over again in human affairs. And if there was a way to build more effective organizations

than a structure shaped like this, somebody would have found it. And so actually, if you want to get anything done, you have a monarchy. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, essentially we see that structures other than monarchies, And of course, democracy is a very tricky word because just because it calls itself that doesn't mean it's that. But fundamentally, you know, what you're seeing, whether something is a democracy or an oligarchy is you're seeing a lot of division of power. And you don't see that ever in a functional company, for example, because a company is not going to survive that. Imagine if Apple had checks and balances and maybe a Supreme Court that decided if its software wasn't buggy. And the users of Apple products voted on the next feature and maybe had an Apple Congress of all the engineers or something, right?

You know, there's no way you could build an iPhone in this way, right? There's also no way that, you know, the Department of Transportation could build a Tesla, right? These are just organizations that have much, much, much lower effectiveness structures. They're bureaucracies. They're bottom-up systems. They're process-oriented. That's, you know, like the paperwork just multiplies infinitely until you really just can't build a railroad from SF to LA. And, you know, you just, you look at systems that are organized monarchically, and you're just like, this is like not just twice as effective.

This is 10 times as effective. This is 100 times as effective. And we happen to be competing with this country, China, which is very much a monarchy, which has this very interesting history where its monarchy was really founded by this. this, it's almost the worst case scenario, this psychopath, Mao. He's really, Mao is just not a, he was a crazy dude, right? And one of the things that Mao did coming out of this revolutionary communist, you know, world that he was in, he did the same thing that Stalin did, which is that he killed everyone in the party who threatened him. And so we established this incredible level of like monarchy, you know, in China,

not, of course, a monarchy in name, but, you know, the rule of one person. in China, he was a psycho, millions of people, maybe tens of millions of people died, and then Mao dies. Mao dies, and there's a struggle for power, and he's created this incredible monarchy, and this monarchy is taken over by Deng Xiaoping. And Deng Xiaoping is actually capable.

It's actually, like, you know, all of the leaders of China since Mao were persecuted in the cultural revolution. Zizu Jinping had a horrible experience, like his sister was killed. Right, you know, and so all of these guys, Like they're competent guys. They're done with any of this maushted,

and they just want to rule their country. And so Deng Xiaoping takes China as a monarchy, and his successors take China from this, like, backwater, third world country. You know one fact about China that most people don't know? Like, if you go to China, you can't drink the water. Everything is crazy modern. You go to the subway.

It's beautiful. It's gleaming, whatever. You can't drink the water, because it still has the DNA of a third world. country because nobody expected to be able to drink the water in China, so nobody bothered fixing it. So actually, you can't drink the water. Right. But everything else is just gleaming, whatever. You know, they're killing us. They're actually, they're destroying our country. They're literally killing us because they're beating us. China's beating us. China's beating us.

China's beating us. There's only a few technical areas where we still have a lead on China. China is beating us like a dog. In what areas? What in this room was not made in China? I mean, literally, what in this room was not made in China, right? That screen was made in China. That screen was made in China. Everything was made in China. So, I mean, like, basically, like, in terms of, and if you go from, you know, the train station in the metro in Shanghai to the metro in New York, you will feel like you have just traveled to a third world country. You go from Dubai to JFK, and you're like, you've traveled to a third world country.

country. And then you go from JFK to say Sao Paulo and you're like, oh yeah, another step down. Right. That's basically how bad it is. And there are a few technical areas. There's like reusable rockets and deep ultraviolet lithography

and you know, a couple of the things where the U.S. is still ahead of China. But they are beating us and they have put us in the same position that we were in with respect to the U.S. where everybody in the USSR could basically look at American gadgets, American stuff.

What do you call China, though? China wouldn't be, what would China be considered to you? Oh, it's a monarchy. What would Russia be considered to you? Russia is also a monarchy. Now, these are monarchies where, you know, they haven't established, like China. China is a monarchy, you know. Define a monarchy.

And you're right. What is the rule of one? Rule of one. The literal. This is the whole Aristotle, one, too, many. Yes, literally the rule of one. We are the third one under Aristotle's ideas. Is that what you're saying?

We're an oligarchy. We're an oligarchy. We're an oligarchy. And so if you were an oligarchy that, you know, Trump would like us to be a democracy, but we're still an oligarchy. And you're reminded of that every time a judge overrules them. And the, but in China, China's a monarchy. It's not a hereditary monarchy. Now, a lot of people in the, you know, it's a sort of, it's more like a theocracy.

it's an institutional monarchy and the rules for choosing the next leader are very strange and opaque and we don't really know what happens when Xi Jinping dies. We don't really know what happens when Putin dies. Nobody has any idea what happens when Putin dies. Isn't that a flaw?

That's a flaw. That's a flaw in the monarchy. That's a flaw. That's a flaw. And so what you're seeing is basically because these monarchies have to pretend to be something else. You know, you'll have these like dictators and the dictator is like, you know, even in the Roman Empire, they never used the word king. They were just like, oh, I'm just the first citizen, you know. That's the origin of the word

prince. It's the first citizen. Oh, you're the first citizen. No, you're the freaking king. Right. But they never used the Roman word rex, which means king in the Roman Empire. Imperator just means commander. So, and they had, and this chaotic succession system basically broke down in the Roman Empire. So in the Roman Empire, you have what's called, you know, first of all, Caesar and Augustus are absolutely great. Their successors, so forth. And then you have this period of what's called the Five Good Emperors from Marcus Aurelius is the last. And the first is Trajan, I think, Trajan or Hadrian. You know, this is like a period of over 100 years where Edward Gibbon is like, this is the best government, you know, humanity has ever seen.

Right. And they adopted their successors, so it was a little more like the Chinese system in some ways. But when you have what's called in the 20th century a dictatorship, it's sort of a monarchy that's struggling to be born and often struggling to be born under very, very chaotic circumstances. So Napoleon, for example, does this. Napoleon is a leftist general in reign of terror era, France, and becomes, first they're larping Rome. He's like the first consul, and he's like, screw it, I'm going to make myself emperor. And he makes himself emperor, right? And he intended to pass on that role to his family, and he used his family a lot. But in the end, of course, it didn't work out.

You know, Hitler is kind of a shit-tier Napoleon in some ways. And he never had a family. Hitler was probably gay, I think. Hitler's probably gay? Hitler's probably gay. So, look, same thing about Obama. if you see a guy who is a highly charismatic world leader and he is not surrounded by flocks of women at all times

what's what would you guess right you know um you know about the Obama gay thing I assume oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah ever seen ever seen a video of of Hitler doing a Hitler salute he's like he's so your gaitar goes off you just you're looking at Hitler and you're like that's Hitler and like if you have any kind of gay at all and you're watching Hitler, you're like, that is a gay man. Wow, you're saying Hitler is gay.

Well, yeah, but if you see the videos... Oh, yeah, there's a thesis. There's a very well-written book by a German historian called The Hidden Hitler that makes this point, like, really, really strongly. Like, he's hanging out

in the men's hostel in Vienna, which was a, you know... Yeah, that one. Which is, like, a gay prostitution site. I don't think he wanted to be gay. He wasn't like a believer in like gay ideology. What? He got recruited.

I don't know how he became gay. But I think he really wanted Ever Brown to really be his wife, but he was basically attracted to men. And, you know, as to what's going on with Barack Obama. If you would have said today, you're going to tell me gay and, you know, Hitler and Obama are both gay. Yeah, I think so. Both of them.

That would be an interesting. Okay. I think so. I think so. But, you know, they obviously are, you know, very different in many other ways. So, you know, going back to the question. Monarchy democracy. Monarchy, oligarchy democracy. Yes.

And the thing is that everyone basically looks, and this is, I think, the crucial point here, you know, for Americans, because they basically look at this oligarchy, which is pretending to be a democracy. And they're like, this is just a lie. And they can tell that this is a lie. and say, hey, this is this other thing that's pretending to be this thing. You know, basically the way the deep state works is the deep state, you know, is the administrative state, the executive, you know, branch nominally. But the so-called executive branch is actually run by Congress.

It is run by the legislative branch. The legislative branch controls its budget down to a very small micro-budgeting levels. It controls its policy and most of all it controls its personnel. as you know, you can't fire these people. Imagine being the CEO, but you can't fire these people. Imagine you're the CEO of this podcast, but you can't fire the people who work for you. What?

Right? That makes no sense. Right. It's not actually an executive branch. We actually don't have an executive branch. We have a legislative branch. And moreover, the thing about this legislative branch is that it's controlled by Congress. Now, Congress ostensibly is democratically elected.

We do have these elections. Almost nobody cares about congressional election. the popularity rating of Congress, I think it might be over 30% now. This is very unusual. Can you bring- 27? I don't know what it is now, but I know when as low as 27. Oh, no, it's been as low as-

It's been as low as- It's been as low as 12th. It gets as- Oh, you've got to be kidding. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the popularity of Congress right now, Rob? I could be up in the 30s. That's very high.

I thought it was 27, but maybe it is 30s today. Approval rating of Congress, what is it? 14. Calip? Oh, it's up to 17. Wow. So right, you know, this is, and this is the organ.

What was the highest, go to the highest point, popularity? 2000. That's on the line 11 moment. 84. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a weird, you know, but like the thing is 17%. Right. So here's how you keep the system from, you know, being an oligarchy rather than it. democracy. It's really very easy. You basically run the whole executive branch procedurally,

according to what is called sort of laws that are passed by Congress, which are actually like micromanagement bills as thick as 10 phone books stacked on top of each other, which almost no congressman read. Then you have an electoral system where if you run for, if you're an incumbent running for the House of Representatives, your chance of being reelected is roughly, 98%. So like in the Senate, it's a little lower. It's more like 90%. However, if you get unelected, very sad. Whoever replaces you has no power at all because of the seniority system, which by the way is found nowhere in the Constitution. And so if you manage to unelect, like they unelected, who did they unelect in this guy, Dave Bratt unelected a guy in Virginia

a few years ago? You know, you, You unelect one of these dinosaurs like a Mitch McConnell or whatever. Good luck. His place is Eric Cantor, yeah. Eric Cantor, one of the classic GOPE guys. His place is immediately taken by one of his fellows, and you don't get his job. Because actually the whole thing is run on the seniority system. And so actually, like, you know, one way to test whether a political system or a political power or political structure has become symbolic is to say,

say, if we remove this structure, can the system work in the same way? So, for example, you know, if you remove Charles III from England, will daily life on the streets of England change at all? No, because he's not involved in government whatsoever, right? You know, if you... But you want the monarchy to have influence. You don't want a king that does not have influence. That's just a figurehead.

Yeah, it's a fake king. You're not a fan of the figurehead. I'm not a fan of the figurehead. Because you think America is a figurehead. I think that actually democracy has entered the figurehead model. And so essentially when you get... People would disagree with you on Trump, for Trump to be a figurehead. He's getting a lot of things done as a...

Again, 0.001%, right? Remember what... He's getting... Yeah, he's getting a lot of things done, but relative to his predecessors, he's getting a lot of things done. But on an absolute historical scale, still not really that much. And the, like, again, if you're basically, if you're on that zero to one scale, the question you have to ask is, could this be multiplied by 10? Because if it could be multiplied by 10, it's less than 0.1. If it could be multiplied by 100, it's less than 0.01.

And so if you basically see, yes. You're going to keep going backwards. Sorry? You're going to keep going backwards. There is no progress. What do you mean? How do you make progress with that if you have the system that you actually have to enter a completely. Yeah, you have to multiply.

It's going to be nasty. You have to, no, it doesn't have to be nasty. And that's, I think, the most important thing is that actually you can get up to those higher levels of power without it being nasty. If you look at, for example, the fall of East Germany, almost complete change of power. It's not quite Germany in 1945. It's pretty close. Yeah, but somebody from the West got up and said, had tear down that wall. So there was another powerful figure that was pushing you. So who can't do

that to America though? Yeah. Nobody's there. That's true. That's true. It's a different situation. If I may, let me say this because I want to go to the Iran situation to see because, you know, you, you've commented on Iran as well. So yeah. So I think about democracy, monarchy and like when I'm processing and watching what you're saying in other interviews and then I'm saying, I'm asking questions. Okay. What is the benefit? Sell monarchy. Monarchy to me is 75% by birth, 25% by sword. So 25% by sword. And it says the last time somebody replaced the king by sword was 1689.

Since then, it's been pretty much by birth. Okay, of the 75% that's by birth, there is no competition in a monarchy. But you're not including dictators in that set. I'm not putting dictators. And so if you look at, say. But if you let me make the points of where I'm going with this is the monarchy side, if it's by birth, there is no competition. It's the oldest son. It used to be 50% oldest son in the 1600s. Then it went to 60% today. It's about 80% is the oldest son that replaces the king. So 30 years in advance, I know who's

going to be my king. So it's not like I'm going to go run in campaign. And then it says monarchies make more long-term decisions with debt than in America on a democracy. You may offer anything to get elected because it's a four-year election cycle. But then at least in a democracy, you have more freedom more say in a monarchy you can be you can get a good leader good king and then all of a sudden the next guy comes up and holy shit this guy's a you know dictator control doesn't want you to say anything you lose your freedom of speech you lose your freedom innovation he has you have to listen to certain things maybe maybe because he had a big follow not with his father and he hates his father and my father's an evil man i'm going to do everything different than my father because he didn't respect me

enough and didn't we've seen these stories right there you go through oh sure so so monarchies monarchies have a lot of have a lot of failure modes right and historical monarchies have a lot of different kinds of failure modes you can have a king who's the oldest son he's mentally retarded right you know charles a second charles a second of spain right you know um charles a second of spain was a king and he was mentally retarded yeah he was like there was too much inbreeding going on um and um the uh yeah so you know when you have our Henry the 6th of England, you know, also. That guy's name is Charles? Yeah, Carlos.

Not Carlita? No, no, that's it. Carlos. He looks like a Carlita. And, yeah, no, he was too much inbreeding. Wow. You know, and. It's not working out too well for it.

Look at him, look at him. The face is just something's wrong with that guy, right? So the thing is that, that, you know, historically, there's a lot of different systems of finding a single leader. Now, for me, actually, two things. One is that some of the problems that were caused by biological inheritance in the past don't exist anymore

because it's actually with modern IVF, you know, Henry VIII doesn't have this problem of I need to marry eight woman to find someone who's going to give me a son and not succeed in that. You know, you can have a couple hundred. right the ottomans did this thing where it wasn't the oldest son oh no actually it was all the sons of the of the last sultan and he had a harem so he had a lot of sons and they basically fought it out to be who is the next sultan that's not going to work today and the others were strangled with the silken boast right yeah right you know that's not going to work today there's a lot of things that are sort of like not going to work today what we have that works today that's sort of you know in a way

The inspiration is, you know, this feeling that basically, as soon as you get into the private sector, suddenly just like everything works like magic. You're just like, wow, you know, the California Department of Transportation could never build an electric car, but Elon Musk can build an electric car. Obviously, you're looking at monarchy there, right? And you're looking at the sort of superiority of a monarchical structural organization. He is still held accountable by the government, though. He is held accountable in two ways, actually.

He's held accountable by the government who's above him, and he's also held accountable by corporate governance, which is shareholders and a board of directors. Now, if you, so there are sort of things you can learn from that at a sovereign level, but definitely at a sovereign level you don't have a government over the government, right? You're really at the top level. That's what I'm saying. So the question then the average person may ask,

is what would Elon do if he knew he had zero regulatory guidelines to be dealing with today? What would Elon be doing today? So I think that actually Elon would not be doing anything that's super different from what he's doing. But this sort of bears, you know, this sort of comes kind of comes into one of the factors in the way Americans think about governance, where they're basically, you remember I said earlier that there's this kind of schizophrenia. where Americans think they have an absolutely terrible government and the best system of government anywhere. So one of the things, when you're in any sort of terrible situation, one of the things that is often causing you to be trapped

in a terrible situation is this little principle called the perfect is the enemy of the good. And you're basically like here we're in this terrible situation, how do I get to a perfect situation? You've probably known many people in many ways who've been paralyzed and trapped. by the how do we get to the perfect situation. Those types of people don't make it in business.

No, they don't. And you've got to be ready to make those compromises. And so when I look at sort of the way at the position that we're in today, which is a very, very difficult position because, as I said earlier, I think meritocracy really accurately sees many flaws in populism, and I think populism sees many flaws accurately in meritocracy. You know, it's like basically, let's take, for example, COVID as an example of this. Now, you know, you might be familiar with the vast flow of dissenting COVID information out there.

There are a vast quantity of memes. Some of these memes are true. Some of these memes are obviously false. Some of them, I can't really tell. It is just a giant polluted river of information. and you basically say from the perspective of someone who, a blue stater who believes in meritocracy, you would basically say,

wow, I'm going to put this sewer in charge of virology. Like, it's like the cartoon of the guy who wants to fly the plane, right? No. That cartoon is fascinating, by the way. Yeah, that cartoon is... Rob, can you send that cartoon to me?

Please continue. And so, you know, you look at this from the perspective of like blue state America and you're just like, oh my god like you're really we're going to have this highly detailed technical scientific thing and it's going to be run by who has the best rumor in facebook moms like no this is ridiculous this is an absurd way to run a railroad and of course they're completely right about that and then populace will look at this and be like uh all right uh it sounds reasonable that we will have virologists run virology but you know what happens if we have biologists run virology they invent COVID. And in fact, if you look at basically the story of how COVID was invented, it looks like it's something that would be done by a mad scientist.

Like an evil mad scientist would be like, oh, yes, we're going to go into the, you know, wow, there was this one pandemic, SARS-1 that looked really dangerous, so wow, we could get some dangerous viruses here. I'm a mad scientist. I'm going to get some dangerous viruses. So we're going to go to all the bat caves in southern China and Lao, and we're going to collect all the bat curates. You think she knew about it?

No, no. It was not actually, this is the crazy thing. This was actually just a normal process. They didn't, like, Fouchi knew about it? He knew about it in the sense of, here, let me, let's, I think it's worth going longer into the, you know, interpretation of COVID. You notice that one of the things that nobody talked about in the 2024 election was COVID. It was not a political issue at all. It's insane. What, what, why do you think? Because it's too big to handle. We actually couldn't fit it on stage. And like, here's the reason why it was too big to handle. So, you know, you basically have all these COVID myths, these populist COVID myths going around, you know. Is it because it's too big to handle? Because the left would have looked bad because both. It's the same thing. So not only with the left of look, COVID was an American Chernobyl. COVID was an American Chernobyl, except it killed like, you know, a thousand times as many people. Right. Because it was a, early COVID was a nasty. virus you did not want to get early COVID oh I got it I was down for 21 days yeah I lost 25 pounds yeah

it was brutal yeah as soon as omicron came out that should have been the end of it actually there's there's another conspiracy theory that omicron was actually a vaccine because omicron appears omicron is great saved my life when I got omicron I was like oh my god you got omicron okay what was the third one delta was delta was nasty delta was before omicron delta was nasty omicron Delta was nasty. Omicron comes out and has two things about Omicron. One is that it's descended from a strain of virus that hasn't been seen in the wild for like six months to a year. Okay? Where was it? It wasn't in the wild. It was in the lab. Secondly, it has signs of being adapted to rodents. Maybe it was hanging out in sewer rats. I don't know. Maybe it was hanging out

in a freaking lab. Maybe it was actually someday we will find out that it was actually a good, mad scientist who invented Omicron and saved us from this garbage. But to get back to the invention of COVID, here's what happened. And I think this basically says a lot about the way our political system, the way this like

meritocracy works. So if you want to be a scientist, I'm in a way a scientist. May I ask you why your eyes? It's just, it's like it's so fucking dramatic. It's just like... Are you getting emotional, truly? Yeah, yeah. This has happened

four times in the interview already. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, because it's just like an incredible fucking story. Because let me tell you the true story of COVID. Okay, the true story of COVID was this is the way our country is governed. So you're a scientist, okay? You probably know a lot of scientists.

You know, I dropped out of a PhD program myself. How do you work as a scientist? You're a bureaucrat. You're writing grant proposals. Okay. What does your grant proposals say? This is important. The government should fund.

it, this is important. Here's what happened with COVID. Stars 1 happens. It's absolutely what it's purported to be. It's a bad virus that gets loose. You ever see the film Contagion? It's a Steven Soderberg film. Matt Damon is it? Is it Matt Damon?

I think it's Matt Damon. You know, the technical advisor for Contagion was one of the coronavirus crew. And the virus in Contagion actually is a bad coronavirus. And so... That movie was going viral. The first week of COVID, the second week.

of COVID, March, April, whatever it was. Yeah, yeah, I watched it with my late life when COVID started. And if you look at, so SARS-1 happens, clearly a real problem. If you're a virologist, you go after real problems because real problems get your grants, right? The problem of bat coronavirus is mutating

to become viruses that affect humans, a zoonosis, that's a real thing. Bam. Researchers converge on this like crazy, and they're like, you know, but what are we going to research exactly? Well, we're going to research the possibility that bat coronaviruses will mutate to infect humans. Of course, they're bad viruses. They don't naturally infect humans. But when we find one that comes close, ooh, it's a big surprise. And how are they going to mutate? Well, you know, mutations happen randomly in nature. you know, how do we predict, that was one of the names of one of the study programs, how do we predict what mutations could happen in future to make SARS happen again?

Well, we'll make them ourselves. And so you basically got this research program, which is completely normal science. This was not a Chinese program. This was an American research program, mainly run out of the University of North Carolina, by this guy, Ralph Barrett, and Peter Dazzak is kind of the big grant coordinator for all this stuff. you know, still walking around free as a bird. And they basically have all of these bureaucratic incentives to act like mad scientists.

They basically have, because if you can take a bad coronavirus and mutated it to become dangerous, that's a paper. The paper says back coronaviruses are dangerous. Please give us more money. This treadmill is still going on, right? And in fact, the guy who replaced Phil, I think his name is Eichelberger as the head of American virology. Fauci has the remarkable distinction of being the guy who supervised this research,

then covered it up and was in charge of the response to it. Truly insane episode. And you did pretty much pardoned so you can't touch them. I think they could, but they're not going to. They're not going to try to prosecute this stuff. Why do you say that? Why? Because that's what I heard from people who were involved.

Why don't? Because both sides are implicate? Because, no, because they just don't. That gets more into sort of what the mission of the Republican world in Washington sees itself as doing. They are basically, they're more like what would be the point. And I'm like, I can tell you what the point is. But like they're more like what would be the point. But let me finish my story because it's a great twist. Please.

So Fauci is out, he's out with the Trump administration. And certainly I think most Americans, do know or suspect that it was a lab leak. Either it was a lab leak or the world's most remarkable coincidence ever. I don't know if you've seen the John Stewart clip on COVID. Oh my God, it's the best thing John Stewart ever day. Yeah, of course.

With Stephen Colbert? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's the best thing. We can't talk about it. It's the best thing Stewart. He was the first guy on the left who did that. And Colbert was uncomfortable.

Yeah, oh, yeah. He'd just, he'd destroy that, right? You know, and like, you're just like, God, this guy's talented. Right. And, you know, the pangolin, kiss the, kiss the bat, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. Right. You know, so anyway, this guy's out.

And Eichelberger is the new head of American virology. I think that's his name, is in. And Eichelberger's claim to fame. He hadn't worked on back coronaviruses at all. His claim to fame. His mad scientist. You've got to be in the head of the mad scientist. Imagine you're a mad scientist or you want to be a mad scientist.

and the Eccleburners, the head of is the Fauci's replacement. If you want to be a mad scientist, you're in the shower, you're having mad scientist, you know, realizations, right? And this mad scientist in the shower is like, I can recreate the 1918 flu. How are you going to recreate the 1980s? He's like, well, the 1918 flu, spread all around the world, kill 20 million people, whatever, whatever, and it infected Alaska.

And in Alaska, they have permafrost. And I can go to Alaska and dig up a dead body from the permafrost that died in the 1918 pandemic. And I can resurrect the 1918 flu. And this will make me a famous scientist. And he did that. And now he's fortunately, I think we're immune to the 1918 flu. Or it didn't leak. But literally, that's how he made his bones.

This is a virologist. I think it's Jay Eichelberger or something like that. It's Fauci's replacement. If you... Who is Fauci's replacement? I'm really curious about this guy now. I'm seeing Hugh... He's the head of...

Alken Klaus. No, no. That was Fauci's aide. Gene Marazzo. No, those were all... Jeffrey Taubenberger. Taubenberger. Okay.

Taubenberger. Sorry. Jeffrey Taubenberger. Who gave him the job? Who appointed him? Trump is a Trump appointee. And he was the first to sequence the genome of the influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu. And he published that genome,

which means that anyone who can basically print DNA can have themselves a nice new Spanish flu. Right. And so when you basically ask to sort of pull back for a minute, why can't we get the mad scientists out of viral? Why do virologists insist on basically behaving as if their job was to invent dangerous viruses as though they were mad scientists? So you would categorize him as a mad scientist? Well, the thing is, no, actually, he's a totally banal normal scientist.

And what's crazy, what's really important about this regime of experts is the way in which sort of normal people become, by doing normal things, become mad scientists. because what you're really looking at here with virology, and we'll relate this back to foreign policy in a moment, what you're really looking at here with gain of function research in virology is a conflict of interest. Because when you have a conflict of interest, you have the nominal interest of some person or organization, and you have their actual interest.

The nominal interest of virologists is to go to Oregon's viruses, to kill all the viruses, right? If you're a virologist and, like, you know, could snap your fingers and kill all the viruses, that would be optimal, except you know what, if you could do that, you wouldn't have a job anymore. Yeah.

That makes sense. That makes sense. Right. And so what we got is the situation in which the nominal interest of virologists, beating viruses, is totally at cross-purposes with the actual incentive on virologists,

which is to make more and more dangerous viruses. Can we, can... So the incentive basically is making them mad scientists, and that's sort of the structural problem. I totally see that. And when populace look, you know, when populists look at Washington, they don't have this kind of intricate incentive-based theory,

but they're like, something is really wrong there, right? You know, and like, when they look at the lab leak, they're just like, you know, it's like, well, I think what Peter Thiel one said about, you know, Trump, which was that he was sort of, you should take them seriously, but not literally, right? And that's sort of true of like populism in general. Populism sees this thing, and it's like, you know, let's take the cartoon with the airplane.

Like, suppose you're in, remember that airline that flew out over the, you know, Indian Ocean and disappeared, you know, if you're in MH370, yeah, you stand up and take control of the cockpit. Because that plane is going nowhere good, right? And when you see the way this sort of system of the rule of institutions and experts has developed all of these conflicts of interest, you know, so let's go to foreign policy, for example. You're like expanding NATO to the East. Okay, what is expanding NATO to the East? It's gain of function diplomacy. Actually, no one can point to a reason why expanding NATO to the East was a good idea. Many prominent experts weren't against it. George, Canon is like, don't do this. William Burns, the CIA head is like, don't do this. We tell the Russians we're not going to do this. We make them informal promises that we're not going to do this. Then we do it anyway. What the hell are they supposed to think? Right. You know, and it's like this compulsion, this sort of bureaucratic compulsion that can't be stopped that has no, you know, possible bearing on the security of Fort Lauderdale, you know. And it just like,

And it's this, you know, this self-licking ice cream cone. And it's a toxic self-licking ice cream cone. It like basically like, I mean, is, you know, COVID kills 20 million people. How many people is Ukraine were killed? 500,000. That was one of the things that I really wanted to know. I really, if there's one of the things that was in my top five that I wanted to know what happened, was that because I think it would be a certain accountability for China as well with the

recklessness, even though you were saying she wasn't involved. But let's wrap up with this. Current event, Iran. What's going on there? Okay, what's going on there? What will happen? What should happen? Wow. I think that unfortunately the current thing in Iran is going to get a lot of protesters killed and not accomplish anything. I think that when a regime falls, protests don't bring about an end to a regime. When a regime falls, it's because it's lost confidence in itself and it no longer believes in itself.

and I don't think the Iatolls are at that point yet. You don't think they are? I don't think they are. You think they will be this year, 2026? No, I think it's a longer 5-10 pro- It's a very random, it's a very random thing, but it still feels to me like clearly the fanaticism of 1979 is not there anymore. Like a lot of that energy is like the energy of Iran in the 80s is just demented, completely crazy.

And by the way, if you don't know this, this is another thing where, overthrowing the Shah was basically the dream of progressives everywhere for like... Of course. Yeah, of course. Most American citizens are honest. And Carter, Carter could have been involved. He didn't help him out. He promised he would.

He didn't. Oh, no, Carter orchestrated getting rid of him. I mean, you know, and like the, this is just like a, like, this is a, this is a, this is progressive diplomacy in the 70s. So how do you process interventionist versus non-interventionist? So is it a hundred percent never don't intervene or does it make sense that time? How do you process that? I would say that, you know, the rules of like statecraft and diplomacy have not changed at all in this world.

You know, whatever we say they are is what they are. The problem is that basically, as Clint East would put it, man's got to know is limitations. And, you know, why we had Afghanistan, why we had Vietnam is that we did not know our limitations. We did not understand how essentially bad we are at basically doing nation building, doing colonialism. Like we sort of intentionally suck at it. These are very solvable problems, but like we are not in a condition to solve these problems. One of the interesting things about the Venezuela intervention, I'm basically an isolationist. I think that the U.S. should essentially abandon its empire.

But I have an open mind. And one of the things that was impressive about the Venezuela intervention was that it was actually reminiscent of kind of a pre-missionary foreign policy. It was a very like practically done thing. So first of all, perfectly executed. That's, that's impressive. That's seriously impressive. You got to take your hat off to that. But also, one of the interesting things was that, you know, you would have expected the Trump.

administration to put in Machado the Nobel Prize winner instead of working with the Rodriguez siblings who are like the core of the old Venezuelan intelligence service. Okay, this is not neo-conservatism. This is not like classic good neighbor policy liberalism. This is really gunboat diplomacy. And it's sort of wild to see this kind of Teddy Roosevelt diplomacy being carried out and apparently working in the present world because as far as I can tell what the Trump what the Trump administration intends to do with the current regime in Venezuela is basically just like give it carrots and sticks such that you know the people in charge of it can just get rich you know and you're just like yeah like you were the head of the Venezuelan intelligence

agency. You are a very dirty person. You've done very bad things. You were going to get rich and your country is going to get fixed. Totally alien to American 20th century foreign policy. Like, you know, or they tried to buy Maduro out. You know what would be an amazing policy? Buy out Kim Jong-un. Basically be like, you know what? Your country is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You're holding it in this like incredibly backwater prison state. The 20th century thing is like, No, we have to prosecute him like Hitler. Okay, we didn't prosecute Hitler, but we should have prosecuted Hitler, right? You know, Nuremberg trials for Kim Jong-un, whatever, you know.

He's guilty of, like, you know, insane crimes. These North Korean gulags are every bit as bad as they say they are. Horrible, horrible monarchy. You buy him off, and you free the country. And he lives for the rest of his life in the south of France, like a freaking prince. You know where Kim Jong-un was educated? Switzerland. He was educating in a private school in Switzerland.

His iPhone is probably the same one as mine, right? You know, like, but he is terrified because he doesn't want to be Gaddafi. Right. And so you had this kind of, you know, this interventionist foreign policy where like the Arab Spring is like this, where it's like, we're going to. But would that be interventionist for North Korea? Would that be expansionist? Well, the words, you know, you sort of, you shouldn't, you know, it would be normal in a way that. And the reason I'm saying, it's like, I'm not getting involved saying, let's get rid of them.

Here's what that's intervention is. To me, it's like, listen, hey, we'll buy you for $88 billion. Yeah, step away. We'll take care of it from here. All right, sounds good. So we're expanding America. Like, you know, everything that we bought, we bought Florida. We bought Alaska.

Yeah, I'm not even, you know, like I'm not even sure we'd, you know, make North Korea state or something, right? But the thing is actually, maybe just give it to South Korea. Maybe say, hey, South Korea, we owe you all this money. Like, you know, let's figure out. how to work this out, right? You know, I don't know. But like that is a realist, that is a, you know, to me, realist foreign policy and isolationism

have always been equivalence because that's kind of the best you can do, right? Actually, the empire, you know, whatever you want to call it, our allies, our international community has been a real loss to this country. it has not been running at a profit. The idea of running a foreign policy at a profit, that's like imperialism. That's gunboat diplomacy.

Like what we did in Venezuela was gunboat diplomacy, right? You're not supportive what we did in Venezuela. I know. I think that actually is very ambitious and interesting, and I hope it works out well. To me, to go in there with a Delta force, preparing for it since August,

you go in, you take him, you leave, wasn't expecting it. Everybody was shell-shocked. No, you know, the way was done, quick operation. I mean, that's just insane to be able to get it done that way. Venezuelans are happy. Venezuelans here are happy. They're excited about what could happen next.

Now, obviously controlling, leading. He joked the other day, he posted something saying the president of Venezuela. I don't know if you saw this or not. He posted something with the president of Venezuela. But this last tweet, Rob, if you go to that one, he just, this is an hour ago. Iranian patriots, keep protesting, take over your institution. save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price.

I've canceled all meetings with the Iranian officials until the census killing. That's more of a neocon move, right? It's a neocon move because basically, and it's more reminiscent of kind of the American, it's more reminiscent of like the Arab Spring. You know, this is a sort of an Arab... What should he do? You're saying don't do anything?

Sit on the sidelines? It's a difficult problem. I would say that... I think encouraging Iranians to do that is bad because I think that they are going to lose and a lot of people are going to get killed. And a lot of people already have been killed. Do you think while he's saying this, you don't think he already has his next time steps figured out? You don't think he already has people in there? I don't know. I don't know. What I'm saying is if you go this bold of an ask, you don't make an ask like this without already knowing it's

about to be done, don't you think? That's a big risk for you. were president to ask the people to do that. Trump is a mercurial man. He's a mysterious man. You know, the administration is actually pretty good at keeping secrets. I certainly don't know what is being planned there. Again, you know, if you'd asked me before the Venezuela operation, I would have said, don't do this, right?

After it was done, I was like, you know what? When the facts change, I changed my mind. So, you know, if you, if I think it would be certainly wonderful if the Trump administration and the people of Iran could pull this out in some way that worked. It's a very dangerous thing to do. I think the probability of failure is greater than the probability of success. I agree. Just so you know, I agree with you, that the probability of failure is higher.

But sometimes you've got to take a gamble. And is this a gamble they're going to take? We're going to see. Well, you're going to see what they're going to do. Yeah, I think the people who are surrounded around Iran, who are. And you have an Iranian. Jewish background, right? Not Jewish, Iranian Christian background. My mother and my father did Christian. But David, the David. Yeah, most people think that. But David and Assyians

means Betta, House of David, and a mother's Bogosian, Armenian. But I've been around Christians, Muslims, Jews, my entire life. I mean, the story. Do you speak Farsi? I speak fluent, Farsi. I speak fluent Armenian, flew in Assy. What do you think is going to happen in Iran? I think this is the closest it's ever gone. I think if Biden doesn't become president, in 2021, Iran would have fell on 21-22. So I think those sanctions were really destroying Iran, and he just put on the sanctions. I don't know if you saw that two days ago.

He said yesterday, Rob, if you have this, anybody that does business with Iran on putting a 25% sanction on you, I don't know if you saw that. I saw that. That was literally yesterday. So this has been the playbook for a minute. And I think it's, is that the one?

Yeah, right there. Effective immediately, any country doing, business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay 25% tariff on any and all business being done in the U.S. The order is final and conclusive. Thank you for your attention, right? You should like. I love thank you for your attention to this matter. It's so good. It's so good. He wants to make sure you're paying attention. No, but to me, it's the closest it's been done. And if you look at what happened with Venezuela just a few weeks ago, to be able to pull that. off and pull this off within a few weeks, I don't know what award you give to this guy.

To haven't done that in 12 months? How to hell do you do this less than 12 months? Call me again. Call me again when he gets it done. For sure. We'll have that follow up. You know, the, I mean, there's no question that the, I mean, the Venezuelan regime, I think was worse than the Iranian regime. You think so? I think so. Why do you say that? Just, you know, Iran is not full of chaos and crime and the thing is actually you must not follow it closely not like not like the way there's hanging people and the way they're doing yes but it's still a government you know oh now they're going they're going nuts right you know but the thing is that you know there's an there's an old arab saying which is the the just the the tyranny of the lion is better than the justice of the mouse and in venezuela

basically it's just like everyone steals independently everyone is a criminal there's like a whole criminal structures all the way up and down like you're and in iran at least you have a government right and you know those who believe that anarchy is better than government like they don't know their anarchy like in venezuela is not just doesn't just have a shitty government with a shitty you know intelligence service control torture chamber or whatever Yeah, it has that, you know, but it also has just like massive chaos and dysfunction of a sort that is not seen in Iran. And so, yeah, it's still like it's a- Iran to me is a whole different story. Like the levels of crime, torture, what Iran is doing, the proxy wars and the amount of different military Houthis, Hamas, you know, Hezbollah, everything, they're funding.

They are chaotic. They are- They are creators of chaos. But the thing is, you're still, I would rather walk down the street in Tehran and the Caracas. Can we get him a one-way flight, Rob, to just kind of send him there with a camera. Jake, you follow him with a camera, just documented and see what happens. And we send him to Brazil. Anyways, Curtis, this has been a blast.

Really enjoy talking to you. For the people that are watching, you can actually Mnacht him. You may agree or Dizzy. You're like, I don't know what he said. You can ask him any questions on Menect as well. But Curtis, I am looking forward to the next one after seeing what happens here. But appreciate your time. This was fantastic, man.

Thank you. Absolutely. Take you, everybody. Bye, bye, bye, bye.