Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #352 - China Mocks U.S. And Biden Admin Over Afghanistan Disaster w/Yossi Gestetner

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

Tim, Ian, and Lydia join commentator, organizer of OJPAC, and marketing expert Yossi Gestetner to examine Joe Biden's speech about Kabul's fall, Wikipedia's selective editing to cast Democrats in better light, an unsettling video of Afghani soldiers being hopelessly bad at basic military exercises, and China's threat to take Taiwan back after the fall of Afghanistan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today was a disaster. I mean, the past several days have been a disaster with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. First and foremost, I have long maintained, as has many other libertarian personality types, even some conservatives and many Democrats, have always said it was a disaster to be in there in the first place. There was no good time. We should have left. So at the end of everything, I'm glad that we're finally leaving Afghanistan. This is not the American nation building project, or at least it wasn't supposed to be. I think a lot of people got rich off of it. Joe Biden was one of the architects of the original invasion of Afghanistan in the first place. And I think right now we've got to acknowledge, at the very least, it would have been very different under Trump. That doesn't mean

there wouldn't have been chaos. That doesn't mean that there wouldn't have been criticism. But I certainly think the Biden administration has proven to be extremely weak with several disasters like the economy, the border. I mean, gas prices are through the roof. Inflation is through the roof. And then you see this. When the disaster began unfolding, where was Joe Biden? Where was Jen Psaki on vacation? Well, Biden came back briefly to give a speech.

And actually, a lot of people are saying good things about it. And it's kind of ironic because of all the things you could give credit to Joe Biden for. The last thing I thought anybody would praise him for was speaking. But it wasn't his ability to speak. He said some things I agreed with that. What are we going to do? Send U.S. soldiers to go fight a war the Afghans don't even want to fight themselves? Or what are we going to do? Pass this off to the next administration? Although it was he didn't it was, he tried to take responsibility, but also blamed Trump and blamed Afghanistan. So, all right, I'm not going to say too much. We're going to get into all that and we'll talk about it. China's reaction has been, I would say this is, what's the right word? I don't know. It should be taken as a warning. China's official state media said when war breaks out with Taiwan, the U.S. will obviously not be able to do anything to defend

them. They didn't say if they said when. So we're going to talk about all this. And I think there's some nuance here. I think there's a lot of people who are being very tribal, you know, looking for reasons to criticize Biden. And I think there's tons of reasons to criticize Biden. But I think let's let's look. I'm always going to acknowledge someone doing something good or saying something good. We shouldn't be in Afghanistan. We should withdraw. He could have stayed. Glad he didn't.

But let's let's break down exactly what's going on. We've also got some stuff with with inflation happening. And I think, look, guys, obviously, in the end, Biden's a disaster, complete disaster. But joining us today is political commentator Yossi Gestetner. Do you want to introduce yourself? Hi, thanks, Tim, for having me. My name is Yossi Gestetner. I live up in New York, and I've been a political commentator in the Jewish community in New York going back all the way to 2005 as a written columnist on a weekly basis and also on a podcast through a phone system,

believe it or not, there are tens of thousands of observant Jewish people who do not have access to the Internet at home. So they rely on a comprehensive phone system, which would serve as a podcast for news, information, entertainment. And I've been blessed to be a commentator there going back to 2007. And, of course, I like to be active on Twitter a couple of hours a day, too much. But I think Twitter is an interesting place to debate people, to hear ideas, and to get a message out there. So that's what I do in the political arena in terms of commentary.

Right on. You had some good tweets about Biden, so we'll get into all that stuff too. We also got Ian. It kind of feels like a mix between Christmas night and we're celebrating this whole Iraq pullout thing and September 11th, 2001, I was in New York. And after the buildings came down, we all got together out and had lunch. And it was like the most dazing, disorienting, chaotic feeling. And I kind of feel like a mix between that and Christmas right now with this Iraq thing.

You mean Afghanistan? Yeah. Get us out of Iraq. Yeah, I mean, it is a good point because on the one hand, I think people are glad to see that the U.S. is moving on from Afghanistan in terms of having boots on the ground. But the images being a complete disaster is something which will live in infamy. So I think that's the contradiction between being a joyous time and a concerning time. Yeah, yeah.

This will be interesting. There's also some interesting media stuff and media manipulation stuff. I noticed in the changes to the Wikipedia entries to the Taliban, which I think have political significance. So we'll talk about that, too. We've got Lydia pressing buttons. I'm pressing buttons in the corner. I'm intrigued by what happened this weekend,

and I'm really interested in what we figure out tonight. But don't forget, go to TimCast.com. Be a member. We've got a whole bunch of amazing journalism, and we're going to have a bonus segment, members-only segment coming up around 11 p.m. or so we do that monday through thursday so make sure you check that out support our work but uh uh let's get into the news before we get started again just smash that like button subscribe to the channel share with your friends that that does it for our introductory

plugs let's talk about what's going on in afghanistan and the first thing i want to address is i was shocked by by uh the news uh when when joe b Biden started giving his speech and I was watching it. I was shocked to see how many people were actually praising him. I mean, notably, my friend Cassandra Fairbanks, when she said it was a good speech, not that it's absolving him of responsibility, of his failures, but at the very least, look, I got to say this. He said a few things I really did like. And I think the important thing about it, why I'm going to say this. He said a few things I really did like. And I think the important

thing about it, why I'm going to say thank you for saying these things, notably, we can't send Americans to fight a war the Afghans are not willing to fight themselves. We were not supposed to be nation building in Afghanistan. We cannot pass this on to the next president. And we can't send another generation of our men and women in uniform to go into this quagmire, this waste of money. Those are good things because it vindicates a lot of the anti-war positions of Democrats, conservatives, libertarians, basically everybody who have been saying the same thing. Finally, you get the president to come out and say it.

That doesn't mean he's done a particularly good job with the withdrawal. In fact, a lot of people are kind of shocked at how bad and disastrous it was. Surprisingly, as I said earlier, I said in the intro, the one thing that he's getting praise for is the one thing probably no one ever expected actually speaking. To be fair, though, not everybody is giving him praise. A lot of people are saying that it was a mixed bag. He was blaming Trump. He said, well, I inherited this deal.

It's not my fault. And the Afghans are the ones who don't want to fight. But the buck stops with me. It's like, all right, we'll just come out and say that you made the decision. I think ultimately, it was the right decision to leave. Obviously, bad things are happening. But you know, with that, I can I can respect that we're getting out of Afghanistan. You're also you had you had similar tweets, I think you were Yeah, my the point that I'm trying to make over the past 36 hours is, you know, people were pushing around blame on the withdrawal.

I don't think the debate is if the U.S. should leave or not. The question is why abandon the place? Again, most of my commentary over the last 16 years has been on politics here at home, economics, and the politics of politics. Like, I wouldn't say that I have expertise in the military field, but just, you know, following a little bit the people trying to push around blame between Trump and Biden, you know, everyone says, well, Trump had a plan to leave. Okay, so does a plan to leave mean that we'll have this disaster? My guess is that if Trump were president and the Taliban were advancing over the last few weeks, he would pop off 10 tweets a day, tell them one more step these guys are making, we'll drone them,

and he would probably unleash hellfires on them too, hellfire missiles, and they would probably stop the advancement. You know, the U.S. for the last couple of years had only, the last year or so I think, had only 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan, and the peace was kept. Why is that? It's because people understood, people on the ground understood that the Afghan government is underwritten by the U.S. Underwritten by the U.S. doesn't mean the U.S. needs to have 20,000, 30,000 troops.

It means that the U.S. is there to give air supportS. doesn't mean the U.S. needs to have 20,000 or 30,000 troops. It means that the U.S. is there to give air support, intel, and to take care of the bad guys. The problem here is not the withdrawal, it's abandoning the place. As I said, if Trump were in, I think we would probably see from him dozens of tweets every day going back a couple of weeks

warning them that if they go one more kilometer, he'll smoke them, and he would probably smoke some of these guys and they would stop. Yeah, I agree. So, yeah, I don't think the – I think Michael Tracy's name is. Yeah, so he made the point that, well, any withdrawal would be a disaster. It would be difficult. I don't know.

We had 2,500 troops, and now we have – we sent back seven to clean up the mess. Again, I have no expertise in military work, but it seems strange. So I don't think every defense department or every administration would necessarily execute something the same way. This is what kind of bums me out is Joe Biden saying some of those things that I mentioned. I'm like, thank you for saying that for America to hear. Because now it's like, what was that about Ron Paul? Oh, he was right. What's that about those who are opposed to this war? They were right.

But in the end, it just feels like they're sitting in a room going in a meeting. Like, what do we do? How do we address it to the American people? And someone's like, I'm going to say whatever they want to hear because we screwed this up. But I want to say I agree with you. Trump would have been bombing them. He would have been bombing him he would have he would have i think correct i think trump in in office would have probably preserved some of the

gains in other words the damage of the way this withdrawal was done is the way it was done uh it's not preserving what you have and i don't think you need necessarily troops on the ground to preserve it. The understanding was, I think we can walk it back a little bit to May. The official deal was that the U.S. is going to leave in May. Why didn't the Taliban pop off in May? Why did they wait until now? Obviously, there was some either

understanding on the ground or movement by the U.S. that the Taliban decided now it's time to move. So the U.S., with a couple of thousands of troops on the ground, was able to hold back the Taliban from May till now, which means they were probably able to do that going forward with some sort of a, not even a contingent of troops, but again, drones, or just being there and saying we are going to defend this government

and don't dare make any moves. I think people would listen, as they did. I think the main issue is that it's Biden. You know, look, obviously the Taliban, China, all these other countries, China's making fun of us. We'll pull that up in a little bit. They can see that we've got an economic disaster. We've got a border crisis. We had leaked audio tapes of Mayorkas saying, you know, we can't sustain the border.

It's a disaster and effectively saying we're going to lose control of this. And then you look at Joe Biden calling, you know, shutting down press events like not showing up, going on holiday. People are criticizing him constantly. Jen Psaki is on vacation. The Taliban have been seeing everything's been happening with this. And they're probably thinking this administration is too weak to do anything. Now is their opportunity. So I think with Trump, like you're right, he would have been tweeting like a madman. And I definitely think for better or for worse, Trump was viewed by a lot of people around the world with disdain and fear because he was kind of erratic. He was kind of he was extremely arrogant and aggressive. And so you had this this, you know – it's kind of a negative of character, right?

But when you realize what that means for the Taliban, they're thinking this guy is insane. He's going to drop bombs on us. Yeah, I think Trump strategically decided the whole world is shivering every time Kim Jong-un is going to do something. Trump figured, well, I can be Kim Jong-un times over because I'm the U.S. We have a bigger military, bigger budget, bigger means. So if everyone stops, oh, you know, this madman is going to go crazy, you know what, let me play the same game. Again, I haven't spoken to him, but just to guess the way he behaved. So what I'm saying is withdrawing with this disaster just means, as China said, you know, that people in Hong Kong or Taiwan, whatever, should know that the U.S. is not going to be

there. And that's a distinction, I think. We've been saying that about Taiwan for a minute, that with the escalation of rhetoric, with China sent in aircraft into the Taiwanese defense airspace, I'm saying Biden's going to do nothing. I mean, Mark Milley, I think, is too weak. But let me ask you, who has appetite for it? For war? Yeah, for the U.S. to take on China. I mean, if the U.S. wants to take on China, China's main, I wouldn't say objective,

but the main tool that they use is economics. They keep on investing in other countries. They buy up properties, infrastructure. They lend money to countries. We are busy, you know, I don't know, playing games here at home. So we can pin it. Again, I just want to, you know, challenge a little know, playing games here at home. So we can pin it. Again, I just want to, you know, challenge a little bit of thinking that Biden wouldn't do, but who would do and who would back it? You don't think Trump would have lost his mind and sent in

a bunch of military? I think there was a smaller chance of China doing something against Taiwan with Trump than it is with Biden or someone else. But again, I'm not making any military predictions. I'm saying if you look at China the last 20, 30 years, their main objective around the globe, I think they even have a deal with Afghanistan or Pakistan. They have business. I think they're announcing support for the Taliban. Correct. They have support all over the place.

And in the U.S., most people weren't even with Trump on the issue of balancing out tariffs and import and export. I want to pull up Biden's speech because I think as much as we can be happy that he said things, we got to call out the criticism and we got to hold him to his word. So let me just read a couple of things he said. When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under this agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan

by May 1st, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office. U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in the country. And the Taliban was at its strongest

military since 2001. The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. There would have been no ceasefire. There would be no agreement protecting our forces after May 1st. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1st. There was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces

or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan and lurching into a third decade of conflict. I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That's why we're still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency, but I always promised the American people that I would be straight with you. The question I have is, as he goes on to talk about American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight themselves,

does that apply to every other country that the U.S. has military bases in? Does that apply to Syria? Should we be there? If Biden wants to come out and say these things that are going to be ear candy to people who are anti-war, I want to see him actually put up and follow through. And then... Yeah, I mean, the U.S. has, what, 25,000 troops in the Korean Peninsula. And so if Biden's stance is that the country locally isn't willing to put up a fight and therefore we should leave, then I guess the U.S. can save a lot of money. Yeah. Withdraw from Korea.

From Japan, whatever. Yeah, it is in South Korea, whatever. It's an interesting point. That's why I don't think it's serious. I think what happened is they inherited this deal, and i think they hate that they did i think you know if trump didn't negotiate the withdrawal because the american people wanted it i guess what was it like trump came in on like day three or whatever and told all those people we're getting out of afghanistan we're done with this i can't remember who told us that and i think they were they were

mad about it but i think biden did realize trump drew down our forces to a degree we're going to follow through but man did they not plan for this? I got to say it. They extended the timeline by three months, clearly did not use that three months for planning because the question everybody has is why didn't they disable the American military equipment? Why didn't they blow it up or burn it or destroy it? Because they didn't do it all these months because they were under the illusion that

Afghan military is a legit force and they'll use it. That's the problem. But I think – but the counterargument to that is, okay, that's why they didn't blow it up two or three weeks ago. But why not over the last few days just blow everything up if you're anyway dealing with a bunch of clowns? Yeah, the Taliban doesn't have an air force. I guess now they do. And they could have just droned, like gotten rid of – there's a meme going around saying they got 166 Blackhawks. I don't know if it's true, but there are like more than many other countries just gave these people these weapons.

Yeah, but I think in terms of military equipment, every year there is the defense authorization bill. I think the last one was $787 billion. Both parties in Washington are willing to continue to spend on military hardware, military infrastructure, and there isn't any accountability. In other words, accountability, not if a defense contractor charges $2 more than they should per item. It's just like who decides and who is accountable to whom when a certain amount of Humvees or Apache helicopters are sent overseas. Remember that photo of ISIS driving around that truck that had some American business printed on the side of it?

GM, I think. No, no, no, no. It was like a local plumbing service. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was like, how did that truck end up in the middle? Like, what is this? I think a white pickup or something. Yeah, something weird like that.

Normally they'll use nanothermite to decommission vehicles when they're not using it anymore. It's a military-grade incendiary that will melt the vehicle from the inside. But in this case, it's like, hey, now they have some vehicles that we can figure out how to destroy by building new weapons. And now we can fund Lockheed to do that. Let's talk about the political manipulation of information. Let's call it that.

This morning when I was reading about the news and just going over general fact-checking and stuff, I came across, I was fairly certain, I was reading somewhere on Wikipedia that the Taliban was estimated in 2017 to have 200,000 soldiers, which is a massive number. And that means there was a massive increase in the size of the Taliban during the Obama-Biden administration specifically because their numbers were substantially lower around 2008 or so. So they went up from like, you know, 18,000 to 50,000 to 200,000 by 2017. Well, that would imply that Donald Trump, before he came in office, inherited this conflict in Afghanistan that was untenable. 200,000 Taliban, that's a crazy number.

Well, we were doing research for this show, and I was like, I want to pull that up and talk about that. That's a really interesting, see, like, who's really at fault here? I mean, Biden's president show, and I was like, I want to pull that up and talk about that. That's really interesting. See, like, who's really at fault here? I mean, Biden's president now, but he was vice president, you know, for eight years when this problem was happening. So I Google searched. Here's what you find when you Google search Taliban size in 2017. It says in 2017, the Taliban was estimated to have 200,000 troops, and that's the Wikipedia entry for the Taliban.

However, if you actually go, that entry has been removed, and they've changed. I'll just go right in. They've changed the year, check this out, to 2021. Now look at that. That's really interesting because, you know, why those years and why remove that source and then say 200,000 in 2021? Well, in my opinion, it changes responsibility. If you're saying that in 2014 there were 60,000 Taliban, you're basically implying that under Donald Trump the Taliban massively grew in size. Yet when you Google search it, it said 2017. So which is it?

Honestly, I don't know for sure. The sources have changed. And I'll tell you this. Everybody is going to try and use that to point the blame at the other side. But I do think it's fair to say Obama Biden had eight years of this. Trump came in, put in a deal to shut it down. I'm glad it's finally over. I can say that. I don't know if you guys what your thoughts are on the numbers. Yeah, I don't know who keeps count on the Taliban count, on Taliban numbers. If it's intelligence community, they were saying a couple of days ago that Kabul can hold Taliban push for 90 days and it held like for 90 minutes, for 90 hours. Isn't it crazy to think that they have 200,000?

That's a huge number. I'm wondering if they changed the way that they measure who's in the Taliban or not, like they do with the census. Like how Obama did when he started killing civilians. Right, like it could be any non-American supporter. I saw a tweet, I think, I forgot who it was. He said that any red tape, any refugee red tape from Afghanistan needs to be removed and we need to welcome in refugees. So I wrote, what's the process for the U.S. to protect against former Taliban members who will then claim they're refugees?

It's not like the U.S. has a database of exactly everyone who was part of the Taliban. So I think a lot of these numbers, whether they're more or less, I think it's just guesses, estimates, which if it's from the intelligence community, it's potentially flawed, as we have seen many things that they estimate about Afghanistan being totally flawed. So the source for the Wikipedia that says 200,000 is in January. Now, here's the funny thing. Al Jazeera, the Taliban explained, they say on the 25th of July, 2021, an update on August 15th, they mentioned, scroll right down, the group is believed to have 85,000 full-time fighters across the country and exert control over more than half

the country's roughly 400 districts. Why isn't this article, which is newer, used as the source on Wikipedia? Why was the data changed? It's good propaganda, baby. That's a lot of Taliban. Makes us look like the good guys. Isn't it crazy to think that we're in an information? I'm not going to say one is right. I'm sure someone will make their argument.

They'll be like, oh, well, that was an official report from a military contractor or from the government. This is Al Jazeera. And then someone could argue, well, Al Jazeera has got resources in the region. They certainly have better access to the information. They're going to know better. Everyone's going to argue. But I'll tell you this. We are constantly in the middle of propagandistic warfare.

It is a horrible reality of the world we live in. We used to have TV commercials. Now it's constantly – they're changing history. The news breaks. It looks bad for Obama. So they had four years hey the estimate 200 000 they removed the 2017 number now now it seems like trying again who is who is like who is looking at afghanistan as a project in the in the through the perspective

of whether it's a bomb or not i think the average person who follows the news zooms out for a moment says you know what's 20 years there's been many a moment and says, you know what, it's 20 years. There have been many presidents. And even Biden, you know, Biden didn't come in as someone saving the day. He was a senator for I don't know how many years that Afghanistan was going on. And then he was vice president. So he wasn't an onlooker. He was there for most of the time.

So I think a typical person who follows the news a little bit thinks of Afghanistan as a total mess all around. This party, that party, it doesn't matter. It's like it's a mess, and I think people are left scratching their heads. Okay, we had there only 2,500 soldiers there for a while now, and the peace held. So what happened now that everything went to hell in a handbasket? I think just from a practical perspective, not necessarily political, people would want to wonder that rather than exactly when it went up or down. It might be it was costing us $40 billion a year recently, up to now, like a couple trillion since we went in, $2 trillion, I think. So maybe it's just like bankrupt times because of COVID.

The economy is not doing too well. We've got well cut costs i gotta say i really love uh the the meme posts where it's like uh the school children in afghanistan and and all of these establishment dems are like these poor school children now can't go to school and the girls are running home and then someone comments none of them are wearing masks like where's the priority for afghanistan for these kids or whatever not Not that I think that's actually the main priority. You want to hear some interesting number? Yeah.

A couple of months ago when people debated handing out another $2,000 in stimulus, the Democrats wanted $2,000 per family or something, and Mitch McConnell was willing to give only $600. This was a big fight before the Georgia runoffs. If you take $40 billion and you hand it out to Americans, $1,400 more, you can actually give it to 28 million American households. You can give this $40 billion. So Mitch McConnell was willing to sign off

on all these big military spending bills every year. And this is just $40 billion for Afghanistan. And he wasn't willing to spend money there. It's just interesting how people decide their priorities for politics. Yeah, and it's interesting. I think the important thing to point out is the establishment Republicans and Democrats were all in on this. It was, you know, like I think it's silly to play these games you've got people saying blame trump on twitter it's virally trending you've got people saying you know biden's crisis or whatever

i do think it's fair to say like biden's the president you know i i we don't know what trump would have what would have happened we can speculate i certainly think there would have been problems he would have been criticized but i think you look at what he did with like sulamani and he would have been you know he would have been criticized. But I think you look at what he did with like Soleimani and he would have been, you know, he would have been dropping bombs on the Taliban. Yeah, but the question is in a year or two from now, how would people view the U.S. moving on from Afghanistan? Will they view it as – will they remember the few days of crisis now or will they say, oh, you know what? We were there for 20 years. Now we're gone and everything's good.

I think it's going to be real negative. I think it's going to be a smear on the Biden administration in a very, very bad way for him. I think it's going to be used by Republicans relentlessly. But I do think a lot of regular people are going to say

both parties were involved. Both parties take responsibility. To be fair, though, I think the Trump base and Trump himself are only, you know, they're not really Republicans in the traditional sense. You know, Trump was an insurgent candidate. The Republicans didn't like him. They didn't like him when he was president. And even now, you've got the establishment Republicans, you've got the populist Republicans making up a smaller batch of those running in 2022. Ultimately, I think we can look back to 2000s.

We can look back to all the mistakes that were made. I think in the end, a lot of people are just going to say, I'm glad it's over with, but we're going to see a lot of news about what's going to be happening in Afghanistan after this. It's going to be, you know, women are already wearing burqas, like literally a day later. And you see all the women, even you even have the reporters, you know, that Clisher Ward from CNN, she's wearing the burqa now. She is saying that the meme isn't correct, that she made this dramatic change. She always wore a headscarf, but now she's wearing the more serious one.

Yeah, she wrote she's wearing something more. And as I wrote on Twitter, you know, it's interesting how some reporters, I'm not saying she specifically, they are, you know, they have the self-proclaimed guts to go after the pro-religious states here in the U.S., but when they're overseas, they respect religion or whatever. You know, if you want to respect religion on whichever level it is, then, you know, you should do that at home, too, and not pile on to Indiana or Texas or what have you. I think in the coming months, we are going to see some really awful imagery out of Afghanistan. I think a lot of people in the establishment

are going to try and use it to justify why we should have stayed, why we shouldn't have withdrawn. And I think a lot of people, I think it's going to, actually, I take that back. I take that back. What I want to say is

I think there's going to be news available, but I wonder if the media is actually going to show it because it will reflect extremely poorly on Joe Biden. Whether you believe it's his fault or not he's the president and people are going to say the biden administration and afghanistan the biden i think it's going to be really bad for him uh you know what we don't have is a lot of video of the war itself which we had in vietnam was all the video on the ground with the troops dudes

getting their legs blown apart guys guys screaming for their mother, falling down on punji sticks, the terror, the horror. And in Afghanistan, we didn't get to see it. They opted out. So the door's getting kicked and little kids getting mowed down. We don't get to see that stuff.

So now they're going to imagerize us with this? I'm sorry, Tim. No, no, no, sorry. I just wanted to address one point you made, is that we do have a lot of images out of Afghanistan. We've long had that. But relative to Vietnam, after Vietnam, they realized we've got to stop putting our media on the ground with the troops because they're seeing too much of the horror and we're not going to get our wars if we do. Or Potemkin rides through the secure area. In the first Iraq war, they did a Potemkin ride through the desert for ABC media.

Everything's great. Look it out. Look at the amazing stuff. I think things were relatively stable in the last few years in Afghanistan in terms of the U.S. casualties and so forth. Yeah, our tech is more advanced. Correct. So it isn't the Vietnam era, but I get your point, yeah. We don't see the Americans dying, but we also don't see the Afghani kids getting it either. If they really wanted to make this project or whatever they were doing work, you'd have to be there for 100 years.

You would have to raise generations of Afghanis. Okay, finish. No, no, I'm saying like... I'm trying to understand. Not to, you know, just to ask a question. The U.S. figured after World War II that they need to stay long-term in many of these places. I don't think things were perfect the day after the war.

Probably there were some casualties and issues. So from a policy perspective, if the U.S. was able to keep the peace relatively okay with just a few thousand troops not even being so active on the ground, what's the problem with that? I mean, you still have troops today in Germany, obviously not because to keep the peace there, but just it illustrates the point where for many years East Germany and West, the Berlin Wall came up in 1960 or the late 1950s. It wasn't right after World War II, which finished in 1945. So obviously any place where things are so rocky and so destructive,

it probably takes many, many years to have some sort of an outside peacekeeping force or something. So I understand people became tired from Afghanistan, but considering that the U.S. kept at peace there now with such a small amount of troops, why jump now? Again, I'm trying to figure it out. Economic, I think. I don't know, because it costs so much money. Well, I think a lot of people, Trump supporters especially, don't want our troops in Germany.

Donald Trump gets a big, big hand for this. I have a lot of complaints, but he was adamant about getting us out of Iraq. He drew us down and put us on a course. He drew down the forces, and therefore Biden comes in and does what? What's the connection between that and Biden's decision now? Then what happens? Biden said he thought what? That he can't go back on the deal?

Yeah, because it would just mean the Taliban is massively powerful and we don't have enough troops to actually stage combat. So we better just get them out. I mean, Trump laid the groundwork. And you know what? A lot of people – I'm not a fan of the U.S. being the world police. I like the idea that – I'm not a fan of the US being the world police. I like the idea that – I'll put it this way. When I play civilization, I don't go around conquering nations.

That's not how I play it. I play to strengthen and make the world – make life better for the people of my country. The idea that the US could keep just going spending money in places like Afghanistan to try and build nations, I'm not a fan of that. I'm not a fan of the US having troops in Germany for for that matter. I mean, World War Two has long been over. Are we really concerned about Europe? Can't they provide for their own defense? Yeah. So in terms of if it if being in Afghanistan was the issue of being there was mostly a monetary decision, then what about whatever amount of thousands of troops in Korea or in Europe. What's the rationale for that? I agree. Maybe that we're not building land in those other countries.

Obviously, yeah. Obviously, they were safer there. You didn't have any troops here and there going into harm's way. They were just training there, living there. So I'm not saying it's the same thing. I'm asking this from both ways. On the one hand, if you look at the war after Korea in 1950, 1953, or you look in Europe after 1945, the U.S. has troops on the ground until today. So why not do it in other places? On the other hand, in terms of cost, so if you went out of Afghanistan due to cost,

then get out of Korea and Europe too. There's a big difference. World War II, you had – after World War II, you had the Soviets, obviously, and we split Germany in half. And then with the rise of the Soviet Union, their expansion, you had Vietnam and Korea. The idea there was stop the expansion of communism. I'm not saying I agree with any of that stuff, but I don't know what would have happened. The idea, I suppose, to try and play devil's advocate, would be if you don't stop the spread of communism

and they keep taking more and more countries, eventually it will be impossible to stop the rise of this authoritarian system that murders hundreds of millions. So the U.S. says we're going to engage them in proxy wars and defend Korea and Vietnam. They fail. We failed in Vietnam.

Korea is effectively a 60 or whatever year. Stalemate, yeah. Yeah, stalemate. And then eventually the Soviet Union collapses anyway. So I don't know if the U.S. – you could say the U.S. succeeded in stopping the expansion of communism, which ultimately fell. But what about Afghanistan has anything to do with that giant threat? Correct. In other words, yeah, because if it's a military threat, the military hardware that the U.S. has these days by sending in a strike team or droning something or someone. I think it's not the same.

It's an interesting point. After World War II, they did the liberal economic order. They set up the world police. 1946, England, United States, France decided we're going to set up a global military force to prevent World War III. They call it the liberal economic order. That's where they started building all these military bases.

And they set up a world of limited war. Henry Kissinger, for instance, is a huge proponent. But I think we've eclipsed the age of limited war. It no longer makes sense. And it no longer makes sense to have all our troops in a centralized spot. They're too vulnerable. We do our things from drones from far away. So I think you can cut back from Korea even more and come on from Europe.

I've got to play this video. Guys, you've got to see this video that's going viral. And I got to be honest, I think it's fake. I honestly think this video is fake. It's a video. I'm going to play it. For those that are listening, I'll try to explain it. Where you see a man in uniform.

I got to be honest, like it looks real, but I just can't believe it. There is a man in uniform with a bunch of Afghan security forces doing jumping jacks. And one guy can't figure out how to do a single jumping jack. You jump and you clap your hands and you put your hands down. And he's like going like this and he's shuffling around. The military guy, he looks like an American soldier, just like almost gives up. Watching this video of these guys not be able to do jumping jacks. The tweet is just, it's from some user tweeting to Jeremy Boring.

We tried to train them. I said, how the F is this real? What the F were we doing in Afghanistan? They're not even jumping jacks. Have you seen the video? No. They're not doing jumping jacks. The one guy does a weird shuffle, and it's like, I don't understand.

Watching this guy try to explain to them and just be completely exasperated're it's like i don't i don't understand you know watching this guy try to explain to them and just be completely exasperated it's it's insane i could not imagine trying to deal with creating a military out of people who can't do a jumping jack now i don't blame the people of afghanistan this is not their world they who was it was it forest who told us they believe the americans came to fight dragons was that forest who told us that he didn Americans came to fight dragons? Was that Forrest who told us that? He didn't tell me that. Possibly. He might have told you that.

I wasn't there. On the show. No, I don't know. I don't remember. I don't remember. Who said this? Someone said something about there was like a mythology that some of the farmers had because they didn't know anything about politics or worldly affairs.

And so when the troops were coming, they thought it was to like fight dragons in the mountains or something like that. I mean, North Korea has been telling their public for many years that the rice and whatever food that the U.S. is sending is to compensate for the war in the 50s. So you never know what local governments tell their people. I saw that video, and I'm like, we should have left a long time ago. As soon as someone in command saw that video, they said, all right, let's wrap it up. We'll pack it in. These people can't do jumping jacks.

What kind of conflict are they expecting to win? That's what I was saying before. If the U.S. really did, or whoever wanted this, the military contractors, if you want this to succeed, we have these photos. Little girls and boys going to school. We have the Afghani girls science team and engineering team and stuff. We have this, this is really famous skate video of a little girl skateboarding in Afghanistan. If you wanted that to survive, you would have to stay in the country for a years. And you'd have to constantly fight the Taliban. And I think they realized it's just not possible or it's just an extreme cost.

Because what would need to happen is, here's what we see. Did you see those videos and photos coming out of Afghanistan now? Almost as bad as the jumping jack video. Military age men desperately fleeing full speed, hanging on the side of airplanes, horrifying imagery, loading up the C-17. Why didn't they want to stay and fight for what they had? Because there was no social cohesion. So one of the big mistakes, I guess,

the US and the contractors made is there was no culture. The only culture that existed was people who live in Afghanistan and then say, what should I do, Americans? Like basically just deferring to them. With the Americans gone, they're like, we don't know what we have or what we're fighting for or why. Maybe there is no national pride, the national unity there. It's just things all over the map on a sectarian basis. People who are Shia Muslims or Sunni Muslims. Many of the countries around the world

were created, when was it, 70, 80 years ago, based on religious lines more than anything. It's because you didn't have any, I wouldn't call it a national pride, if you will. You know, what are the values of your country? Just because I live here and someone decided to make a border there doesn't mean that I associate with a person living 10 miles up. A story. That's what the people of Afghanistan lacked.

And you know the U.S. is losing it too when we see like the 1619 Project and critical race theory. I saw these videos. I see these people running and trying to get on airplanes to leave this country. And I'm like,

why wouldn't they stay and fight for their country? Because they have nothing to believe in. There's no great story of the evil that they triumphed over. There's no great story of the evil that they triumphed over. There's no great tale of revolution, how the people chose their will. It's just literally the U.S. came here, told us what to do, and I'm going to school. And now it's like, oh, with the Taliban coming back in, I'll just leave because there's no reason for me to stay here.

It's almost like all America was able to do was to create a hollow shell of a country, or at least what they thought was a country, I guess. There are stories now of… But the challenge is, I mean, obviously the people who joined the Taliban do feel something for Afghanistan. No, right. Obviously the Mujahideen back in the 80s who fought back Russia felt for Afghanistan. So there is obviously something there. Sadly, it's only the side of radicalism, extremism.

But I think there's something there. But on the other hand, there are things lacking. That's what the U.S. didn't understand in this, that you needed to give a story. People needed to have a shared story of the triumph or whatever it is they were resisting. But it wasn't delivered. And I don't know if it's possible i don't know if it's possible to instill like a great story and teach kids i guess the problem is so after 20 years there should have been a generation of young men being like i i i believe in this i i learned these things but they didn't learn any values they didn't learn any philosophy or ideology all they learned was yes yeah in 20 years 20 years is a little generation that's a

generation you've got 20 year olds people are 20 years old today 18 year olds these are these are fighting age males i don't necessarily blame them the u.s did a stupid thing but do we like the taliban no already women are back in burqas. The schools, apparently, the little, rain reports, the little girls are running, running back home. They can't go to school anymore. That's horrifying.

The thing that's going to be imposed on these people. And I think it's the important, I think the important lesson here that every American needs to understand is if you lose social cohesion, if you lose a community identity, like what it means to be an American, why you like this country, what you believe in, and what you're willing to stand up for, and I think we are losing that, eventually nobody fights. They flee.

Absolutely. I think it comes down to the fact that you cannot give someone something and expect them to take as good of care of it as they would if they had earned it themselves. This is true on the personal level, and I think it's 100%, if not even more true on the national level. So when you give the Afghani people something and expect them to take care of it, they're like, well, I didn't have any part in this. I don't have any investment in this. There's no reason for me to fight for this.

I got a better analogy, and I'm walking down the street in Chicago. No one will ever give you a free CD. That's not true. People do. But most people don't. You know why? What happens when a guy's like, hey man, you want my CD? Well, not like... No, people throw it in the garbage. Oh. Normally they're like, hey, you like it?

Cool, man. It's a buck and it's already in your hand. You're like, you just gave it to me, dude. They hand it to you and they're like, okay, $1. The funniest thing is they still do this in some places even though I don't have a CD player. But the point is 10 years ago, because I'm an old man, nobody wants to give you free music. In fact, I had a lot of people in the industry would say, those guys, it's exactly why they don't sell it. You don't value it if it's handed to you. You have to give something and then value what you exchange.

Exactly. you have to give something and then value what you exchange exactly but but uh the u.s did spend a lot of times to train people you know gave them a force so to speak they couldn't do jumping jacks bro i wonder if that's nutrition if these people are like from an era of really bad food and water and they just don't have the intellect i don't think it's food and water i think it's they these are older guys they look like they're probably in their late 20s to 30s and they've never lived in this world i like imagine if if someone came to you right now ian and said you know they want they wanted you to be a boxer someone would be like okay do it let's show me your jab you'd be like yeah do a dance step and then they show the dance step oh put it this way'd be like, how could you not do a jab?

What are you doing here? Imagine since you're 10 years old. I don't know how old you are now, but let's say you're 30. And since you're 10 years old, Canada has troops roaming the streets, and the local government is aligned with Canada. It would be crazy. More than that. It would be crazy.

So then when Canada leaves, like, I'm not Canada's puppet. Get out of here. Get lost. I'm not going to be in there. Who are they? I think we just don't have a real appreciation of what it means to have a foreign force be there so many years. Yeah, massive amount of resentment. You can see it in the numbers of the Taliban increasing like they did, too, if those are real numbers.

It shows that no one respected the Afghan government as legitimate. No one did. Or the U.S. occupation government either. No, they feared the U.S. And so you had peace and you had stability. Stability out of fear, but not out of people

reaching that conclusion for their country. And if your local government were to be in power because the Canadians who are here for 20 years, just to make the... That's a funny thought, by the way. But again, stop a moment, and every intersection is now a checkpoint of Canadian soldiers.

The day they are out, have a nice day. Bye-bye. And you don't want to be on their side. You don't want to be associated with anyone in the government. And in fact, the minute the people in the government, they were propped up by Canada, here's the Canada's leaving, I'm out. I'm not here either. You guys ever watch Battlestar Galactica?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Have you ever seen it? It's good. It's good. There's a season where they find a planet and the Cylons. You know what I'm talking about? The Cylons basically enslave the humans.

I saw the first season. Some of the – Cylons are robots. They enslave the humans. Some of the humans are working with the robots. And so after the humans break free, they're like anybody who worked with them is a traitor. Imprison them, throw them in the brig or kick them off or whatever. I like using these pop culture references because people will be like, oh, yeah, I remember that episode. Oh, yeah.

So what do you think is going to happen? The Americans are leaving. So that's what I'm saying. If we think of everything through the prism of Trump, Biden, Republicans, Democrats, the independent thinking people versus the shoes of a 30-year-old Afghani who, since he is 10 years old, he remembers a foreign force. Sometimes he has good memories of them because they played ball and handed out candies. And then he remembers his father at the dinner, you know, cursing away at these troops. And then these troops come in and sometimes they're there to help. They took away a bad guy.

And then the next day, the bad guy is your uncle. So you probably think he wasn't a bad guy. The military is bad. And then when they leave, it's a complex relationship, I think. Let's talk about China. I got this meme, guys.

I got this meme. It's actually just a news article. Technically the truth. China's state media mocked the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, saying the Taliban takeover was, quote, more smooth than the presidential transition into the U.S. That's true. I just got to say, in terms of roasting and trolling China, wow, that's an Emmy right there. That's a smack in the face to the U.S. That was a good troll.

It's kind of sad, though, isn't it? They're right. I mean, American, domestically, they're right for domestic news media. It gets worse. In a statement from the Global Times, which is Chinese state media, basically the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, From what happened in Afghanistan, those in Taiwan should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island's defense will collapse in hours and the U.S. military won't come to help. As a result,

the DPP will quickly surrender. China didn't say if war breaks out. They said when a war breaks out. I'm sorry, once a war breaks out. There you go. Once a war breaks out. So I'm asking you again what I asked earlier. Who in the U.S. has the appetite?

Who has in which political party, which force, which machines? Whether Republicans, Democrats, activists, media, think tanks. Which institution in the U.S. has patience for wars to protect other countries, especially when there are so many people in the U.S., again, institutions in the U.S., who didn't have the appetite to take on China even on products coming in from the U.S. to Europe, we shouldn't have the same. We shouldn't, you know, so people aren't even willing to put up. Nobody wants war. No, no, but it's worse. People aren't even willing to put up a fight on tariffs

to protect jobs and the economy in the U.S. Right, right. Who's going to say, yeah, I think we need to defend Taiwan? And I think we need to defend Taiwan? And I think China sees that. It's not just that the government propped up but the U.S. collapsed. I think China is aware of the U.S. not having the appetite. It's the apathy of the American people.

War weariness. There's a difference between war in Afghanistan and Taiwan. I think Afghanistan is a huge mistake. It was just stupid. Iraq was stupid. A lot of things the U.S. does in the Middle East are very, very stupid. Taiwan is an ally, and we have allies in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific, and it's a huge threat if China starts attacking them and the U.S. would need to defend them. However, I don't think anybody, you're right, has an appetite for war. But I don't think you need to have an appetite for war if you have a president and administration strong enough to just set that boundary that can't be crossed. And I certainly think, as I stated with the Taliban and what we're seeing now, you look at the economic crisis.

You look at the – what did Joe Biden just do? He increased food benefit payments. Snap. Food stamps. Which says two things. One, more money being given out, which is already bad for the escalating inflation. And two, it shows that inflation on food is here to stay. Now they've got to increase it.

And they're saying it's because they want to make sure people get more nutrients. Okay, well, then you're just giving more free money away. So people are going to be less incentivized to work. You may tell me. I mean, the Taliban certainly noticed the weakness of the Biden administration, but you take a look at what China knows. China's engaged in cyber warfare. They got a great intelligence. They are, they are very powerful and they're looking at this and they know exactly what

they can and can't do. And right now, I think this statement they're putting out, they're not joking. They're not saying this is not meant to intimidate or make the U.S., ha-ha, we're coming. They're saying, no, we're going to do it. And no one's going to stop us because Americans are too apathetic. Look at the way China cracked down on Hong Kong. And I don't think anyone speaks up or wants to do anything about it. The reason for it, I don't know.

This is how it is. Maybe it is because the U.S. was so heavily involved in these two countries over the last two decades at a steep cost to the country in terms of soldiers dying or being wounded, and you have families suffering,

and people don't even know to what end, to accomplish what. So people just become tired. It's like a game almost. And I think there's also a different level of patriotism today versus many years ago. I think this also plays into a lot of it. I think a generation or two ago, people were more willing to fight for the country.

I think today you have it less. What's the reason? I don't know. But I think this is a factor. So if people don't have the appetite to fight for their country, I'm not saying what people, you know, tweeting for their country,

people think that's considered fighting, you know, standing up to Trump, tweeting for the country. Right, resist's considered fighting, standing up to Trump, tweeting for their country. Resist. Then why would they want to be involved in Taiwan and China? I don't know. That's why I wonder. We ask this question of a lot of people. Is the culture war a product of America's enemies sowing divisions online? I mean we heard all the reports of Russian interference and how Russia had been running different sides of the culture war. So the impact was microscopic,

first and foremost. But what they would do is these internet trolls would create a Black Lives Matter Facebook page and then like an anti-Black Lives Matter page. And then they would organize protests around each other so that those conflicts could happen. Granted, it doesn't seem like they had a tremendous impact. But when I look at what's happening in the U.S., the, I mean, how about this? What was it? Colin Kaepernick, I think, complained about the American flag shoe and they banned it. Yeah, Betsy Ross flag. That is one of the most psychotic and insane things I've ever heard.

One of the symbols of the founding of this country. When you lose that cohesion, you fall apart. And now look at where we are. You look at Afghanistan, no social cohesion, no national identity, and they just collapse. No cultural identity, except for the Taliban, of course, and they sweep in like that because they've got a passion for their cause. Now you look at what's happening with the 1619 Project,

Wokeness, Critical Race-Applied Principles, and you have an entire faction of people who don't like this country i'll tell you this i think it was uh was it jimmy fallon he did uh was it was it fallon he did a uh census data came out and it shows that for the first time the white population has shrunk and the audience starts busting out clapping and cheering and then he looks like why are you like what i didn't i didn't watch the whole show but i saw that clip and it was why were they clapping for that i mean probably probably 80 of the audience was white no right like you think about the self-destructive nature of these these white

establishment liberal type personalities but i think a lot of the conversations um in this in this arena i think is also people are just bored out of their mind. And they're looking for reason to belong somewhere or someplace and to accomplish. Like, why not go help a local soup kitchen? And they get involved and they're saying, you're a schtism, stupidity. Like, you're not changing anything. And then they sit there and clap. You're clapping for what?

It's strange. But how about we all agree that China is a major threat and we can rally around defending the people of Taiwan or standing up for them or having a cohesive message of we will defend our allies. Instead, it's just I don't know, man, ragging on

people based on their race or gender or just self-loathing and hating themselves. I think many people who uh you know supposedly as are self-loathing as based on their racial ethnic background i think a lot of it is not real i think they they there's it's just a genre to get retweets or to get attention i mean it's it's not legit. I mean, probably 95%, you know, in the past at least, 95% people in the U.S. would live in communities that reflect their own ethnicity or culture

or marry into families that fit their culture and ethnicity. So a lot of these posts and videos and articles, I think it's just people looking for attention to be relevant. They want to get along on the bandwagon of something. But the point is it shows that we have nothing that unifies us. What unifies us is our hatred for each other in this country. And so you have the culture war, the culture war left and the culture war right, and there's some overlap and weird. It's like we should draw a map.

So maybe that's the byproduct of having peace and prosperity. You don't have the worries and concerns. We do, though. We have China. We have Russia. We have Iran. But then we are so partisan these days that people would take positions on foreign policy based on which president can get more credit or more hits over the head, you know, figuratively speaking. So it's, what I'm saying is, going back to the 70s and the 80s, even, you know, people

were scared from the USSR at the time. People, I think the minds of people were busy with the well-being of the US. But I think we live for a generation already in a situation where there's a lot of peace and a lot of prosperity. Okay, fine. I mean, there's been 9-11 and other stuff. But relatively speaking, it's not – people don't wake up every day. You have this big Russian monster, the big U.S.S.R. They tried.

Yeah, but people don't feel it this way the last 20, 30 years. So you have a whole generation, our generation, being raised spoiled brats. Yeah, but people don't feel it this way the last 20, 30 years. So you have a whole generation, our generation, being raised spoiled brats. And we have the world at our fingertips. And then we see people writing interesting articles, and they get the retweets and the likes, and they get invited on TV, and they want in on it. It's a shame because so much of this energy can be used on bringing people together on concerns that are legitimate, concerns about take the issue of police brutality that's very popular in the liberal field. I think at this day and age, I think a lot of people will admit that there are reforms that can be had in law enforcement. But if you make everything a racial issue,

when there are multiple incidents of police officers who are minority, physically abusing fellow minorities, then obviously the issues of challenges in law enforcement is not exclusively or not only or not primarily race-based. So why are you making it about race when I think there needs to be some overall who gets hired, how they're hired, the training. I mean, your standard police officer, again, I'm not picking on police officers as the individual, talking about the training. They can sometimes pull over someone in the afternoon,

sitting there with a family. It's 4 o'clock in the afternoon. It's a family family man if you will and the tone is if you just stopped is a a terror suspect it's like everyone is dealt with as if they are a suspect of something something is wrong with the training something is wrong with training police officers that they can go this crazy this quick against a person who is otherwise a civilian and then there's also a lack of accountability in law enforcement. I'm not saying now the wall of blue silence or whatever it's called.

It's just, you know, it's who is accountable to whom. So a lot of these things, I think, lead to challenges in how to police a community. So rather than people coming together, law enforcement and civilians, people from all backgrounds to pass laws and rules how to make things better, the whole conversation gets hijacked about race. And once you do that, you lose half the country. And that's why, let me just wrap it up with this, and that's why we're debating today, in 2021, the same issues of police brutality that we did 20, 30 years ago without much change.

I think we're missing cohesive suffering as a society. Correct. Or suffering or worry or concern such as you had with Russia, 34 years. The Russia thing helped a lot. Like fear and worry is helpful, but real suffering is undeniable. Like if I'm suffering and the police officer are both suffering because we're both looking for food, I'm like, okay, we're both in a bad place. You have it a little worse because you've got to go fight guys for a living. But at least we can agree we're both suffering and we have a shared focus as a species to get food.

But now that's completely – in the United States, there's no suffering. I have to induce it on myself. Psychedelics make you suffer. Even basic crime rates, however bad things are the last 12 months, if you want to compare it to the 1990s, I mean 20, 25 years ago, it's beautiful. God forbid any single person getting attacked. I'm not speaking about the individual victim. But again, as a society, it's generally more safe to go out on this. People have less worry as they had 20, 40 years ago.

I think people are just going crazy. I think you got to rephrase it. People have less to worry about, but they're more worried than ever. Okay. It's because we all have our phones. Someone just texted me, I shouldn't use my phone while I'm on the show. It's that bad. This is the thing about police brutality that I've brought up several times.

The reason there's such a hyper focus on it is because it plays well for social media. People know that if they post these videos, if they complain about it, they'll get clicks, retweets, and followers. So they played into it. It's shock content. It's violent content. And it's injustice. I'm okay with all of that. In other words, I understand the drive that people have to get...

No, but what I'm saying is the only thing they'll see is that. They don't get adult reality. Okay. In other words, they don't want to see a fix or solution and so forth. No, no, no, no, no, no. You've got a 10-year-old kid. He goes on Facebook for the first time and 50 adults are sharing police brutality for retweets, for shares. That kid will see nothing but police brutality.

Ten years later, say they're born in 2010 or let's say they're born in 2000. They're 10 years old in 2010. They get on Twitter or whatever. They're not supposed to. They're too young. They do anyway. They see endless streams of police brutality for a decade. Then they're 20 going, why won't anyone do anything about this?

And it's like, bro, turn off the phone and go outside. It's not happening. It happens. It's bad when it does. It's a valid point. In other words, the reality becomes misconstrued. It becomes all messed up. Things are not sometimes as bad as people think,

as it is, as you said. You know, the videos of a police officer, you know, playing basketball with a couple of kids is not going to get so much attention as a police officer doing something bad. Right. But again, okay. I was going to say there's similar criticism to go to uh in today's sense with antifa violence and blm rights and

stuff footage that gets recycled over and over and over again because it plays well but i would say that tendency is more the exception and not the rule because the media mostly ignores it and it doesn't play well it doesn't play well you know there's this old joke you have i don't know how many flights in the air at it and at any given time 7 000 whatever all those flights landing you're not going to have a reporter well look there's another plane landing right another plane you have one plane even the three people on it you know crashing down on the freeway right exactly it's going to become national news that's how humans are right so so the issue is someone could share a video of Antifa and it'll play well with some people who are like, this is bad.

But police brutality makes everyone, even conservatives, get angry. So if you look at like George Floyd, for instance, you get people like Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity coming up and being like, we are upset by this. Correct. So I don't have a problem police brutality being a discussion because I think there are reforms to be had. What I'm saying is that the solution of it, I think six weeks ago there were a couple of police officers who beat up a teenager or whatever in a retail store. I think two of the officers at a minimum were minority officers and the victim was also – it wasn't even a story. So that's the – what I'm trying to say is this.

I understand the shock value, you know, why it becomes news. But I'm also saying that a lot of times people don't want to have real solutions. Of course. They want to fit into a certain narrative, a certain agenda for whatever reason, and therefore things don't get corrected, such as so many issues on police brutality, because I think some of the core causes are not addressed. Who gets hired? Sometimes crazies get hired into law enforcement. Complete clowns get hired, and you don't have a good screening process. And then the training sometimes is insane.

And then sometimes a lack of oversight. So if you don't address any of these core issues and you only focus, let's say, on race, then so many of these incidents will not get fixed. So going back to what I said a minute ago, and as you said it correctly, there isn't a shared suffering, a shared worry. And so people have extra time on their mind. How can I become busy? Or have a cause. Have a cause. And then you have social media and you see certain things play well, you want to get along on it.

And you can make a lot of money spreading negative information. You get very famous very quickly on the internet because that stuff spreads like wildfire. Negative information or information that's very popular at the time. It's like if you notice in institutional media, I have it sometimes in the private practice when clients retain me and I need to work with them on media outreach. It's like if you want to pitch a story to a reporter, if no other journalist picked it up, that journalist is going to say, no, I don't know.

Why will I do it? And sometimes if one person has it, everyone has it. So people like to jump on a narrative, abandoning it. It's an impossible problem to solve, mentioning the negative money cycle. I'm sorry, the negative news cycle and the money made because, I mean, what are we doing? We're going on a show. We're saying, oh, look at what's happened here and that's bad and this is bad. And it's almost kind of a, it's kind of a, it's a recursive loop of us being like, people

sharing negative information on the internet is bad. It's like literally doing that in the space of doing it. Now, here's the point I'm making. What would happen if we decided to stop talking about the things we thought were bad and we stopped talking about the news and these negative things? Then you would have more and more bad things happen because people wouldn't be paying attention and would be allowed to fester and grow. So I think if you go to any person, even a Black Lives Matter activist who's saying police

brutality 24-7, well, they're going to be like, I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm not doing this because I want to be rich. I'm doing it because police brutality is a problem. And then when you're like, yeah, but when you have 100,000 people posting police brutality over and over and over and kids don't see anything else, it's making them lose their minds. I don't know how you solve for that problem. People are allowed to be passionate and fight for what they believe in.

I think there's a balance of too much talking about problems creates more problems. Not enough talking about problems creates more problems because they're not being addressed. So you want to address them and then solve them and then not address them anymore unless there's still a problem and the solution didn't work. And then you've got to readdress them and address a new solution. Right at the equation. But a problem without a solution is basically lighting yourself on fire. But the bigger problem is, again, let's talk about a problem, is that people sometimes don't want a solution outside of a set narrative. Right.

I think that's more destructive than people talking about problems. I love that then. We can debate the solution as opposed to debating the problem. We know what the problem is a lot of times. But people don't want to have – people don't want to debate the solution. I have a friend, a very, very liberal friend, and I told him that police brutality has many factors not related to racism. He was ready to bite my head off, but then I explained some of the thinking, as I did a couple of minutes ago.

He was willing to listen. So I don't think the issue is we can talk about problems all day, China, Taiwan, inflation, the border, Afghanistan. But I think where people get stuck is having constructive conversations about solutions. It's also good to debate problems because sometimes you'll see a problem in a different way than someone else. I think a lot of times with the critical race, especially like Robin DiAngelo, I'd like to have her on the show and talk to her because I think she sees the problem differently than I do. And if we can somehow redefine the problem

so it's a place that we can both understand, then we can start redefining a solution that might... Right, but like he said, some people don't want solutions. And I don't think she does. She does not. She doesn't. She says everything is racist no matter what. She makes money off it.

We change. Like, what we want can change. So maybe she will one day start to want solutions. And give up all her money? This brings me to another point, that many people do not want to fix a certain problem. They do not want to have a solution. It's like people think, you know,

if only you're going to show people numbers about coronavirus and this age and that age, then people will change their opinion about vaccine passports. They don't care. They want everyone to have a vaccine passport. They don't want to hear different information. And if you give them information from the CDC, oh, it's this. No, they give you the buzzwords of you spreading disinformation. Some people are sold or hooked on a certain narrative, and they don't care about fixing it.

I'll give you an example. So during the Mediterranean migrant crisis, it was a migrant crisis because even the UN came out and said, actually, let me start over. So we had this crisis, I'm sure many of you are familiar with, where you had a lot of people from Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries fleeing through the eastern Mediterranean from Syria into Europe and things like that. And that was the result of a lot of the conflict in the Middle East. But it quickly turned into a North African migrant crisis where the UN said these people are economic migrants, not

refugees. Now, I made that distinction when I reported on it. At the start of the refugee crisis, I'm like, refugees are fleeing from the East. Then later on, it was like, the latest information says they're actually coming from North Africa, and they're coming into Libya, and then they're trying to come into Europe. These are not refugees, for the most part. They're

economic migrants looking for work. I had a friend who was posting all this activist stuff and i was talking to her someone i've known for a really long time and when i said hey here's the latest report from the un these you know clearly states these are economic migrants so we can certainly try and defend their lives we don't want them to drown or anything but i think the distinction is important when we're trying to address what these people are looking for block block. She literally just blocked me. She did not want to hear the truth about what the UN was saying about this crisis. So a friend of mine blocked me.

That's how entrenched in ideology these people are. They don't want a solution. They don't want to know what's going on. They have this tribal desire to say, I'm on the right side of history. This is what my community says, and nothing else matters. And so what happens when you have an ideology like that? It's basically a religion. You'll never stop, even if you win.

Not with text. You can't convince those people with text. You've got to talk to them, and you've got to hit them when they're not expecting it with your voice. Real subtle and in your tone that's very cordial and understanding and calm and committing. Then all of a sudden, before they realize it, they believe what you said. But I think the person who blocked Tim is the person who's probably worked up about a certain cause, and Tim was just there, you know, taking it away. Now what?

Right. Which takes us back to what we discussed, started discussing 10 minutes ago. People lose a sense of belonging or accomplishing. Waking up in the morning, fine. You work, you go to school or whatever, you have family, and then what? People like action in terms of activity, accomplishing. To worry about something, they don't have anything. It used to be religion.

Yeah. It used to be that making sure you were doing right by whatever your religious doctrine said. For a lot of people in America, it was doing right by God and living the right kind of life. But can I make a point? People say that they're going to be on the right side of history. Why do we need to wait for history? It's because the prism of history is usually opposite of what has been believed to be the right thing at the time. So you can't be thinking you're right now and going to be right through the prism of history.

You get the point? Yeah, I think a lot about people, great people that are alive today that are receiving a lot of suffering or media negativity is like, dude, you're going to be retrobated in the future, man. Can we just think about what that means, the right side of history? They're not saying they're correct. They're saying in time we will crush you. That's what they're saying. Okay're saying, in time, we will crush you. That's what they're saying. Okay, that's a more cynical way of putting it. But history is written by the victors. Correct, correct. But there's also the real meaning of history will judge this way, that way is that a lot of times things which seem to be popular and accepted at the time turned out through the prism of history to be seen as crazy and insane and abusive.

So if you are now, if your political or policy position now is popular, it's 95% of media output, it's cool and hip, there's a big chance that history is going to look at it differently, which is why we need to wait for history. Although, as he said, the victor writes history. Yeah, I'll tell you what's funny is when you hear that during the civil rights era, what were proponents of segregation saying? It's a private business. Freedom to associate. They can exclude anybody you want from their private business.

And we said, no, you can't do that anymore, which I think is the right decision. Now you look at where we're at with big tech censorship of certain political opinions, and it's the establishment Democrat liberal type saying, but they're a private business. They can do what they want. Just absolutely bending the knee to massive multinational corporations and literally being on the side of private businesses like the people who support segregation. I don't think the standard Democrat that favors censorship does so to bend the knee to a big corporation. They're doing it because, you know, list me five non-conservatives that have been suspended by Twitter.

Real people, except for the... There's actually, there's a lot. No, the big guys, not the big names. Of TV and so forth. It's very limited. On the Republican side, or not even Republican, just the right-leaning side, conservative side, every other day another person goes missing. There are a lot of anti-war left

and anti-capitalist left who have been banned. Big names? I would say... Household names, it's very difficult to find. Who's the person who made that head from Trump? Kathy Griffin. There is not one conservative,

not one person in the right side of politics, not the right conservative, the right-leaning side, that can do anything that she has done and still be alive on Twitter. That was pretty brutal. Well, she got mad. Oh, she's on Twitter still, isn't she?

Yeah, she's still on. And the same thing, what's his name, Keith Oberman? Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. No, no, He's abusive. I like to tell people, like, troll or mute me. You know, I like to kid around with people.

If someone is out there on Twitter and takes it personal, okay, you know, I'll stop. He goes off the rails every other tweet in abusive language on a violation of the Twitter rules, and he's still there. Point being, I don't think Democrats are on the side of the big corporations. They're just happy that the big corporations tend to be staffed, apparently, mostly by people who are aligned politically. But look at it this way. When they're happy that Twitter, for instance, is going to remove their political opponents,

they're laying down their sword. They're saying, we're not going to go after them because we're benefiting from this. So it's like, you know, application of responsibility. They're bending the knee. The corporation's breaking social norms. It's destroying our culture and our country.

And they're going to them saying, but I get what I want, so carry on, good sir. Exactly. And I think we have seen a lot of hate from Democrats and Washington against Facebook over the last five years because Facebook did one thing. They treated Trump in 2016 as a client, and they worked with him. And they were not going to forgive Facebook for treating Trump as a client. Because they treat Ben Shapiro like a client.

And they kept on pushing and pushing and pushing to keep – Facebook kept on getting much more heat from Washington than the Twitter. And I think it's just payback for how they were. And not only this, I think people think that Trump won. He had these narrow wins by utilizing Facebook as an instrument, and people don't want to forgive Facebook. It is a First Amendment issue, what we were talking about earlier, about defining the problems and agreeing on the problems, what they mean and what they are,

and solutions, being able to talk and define those things. If we can't do that on social media or in a public place, then our First Amendment is being violated, and we're not going to be able to solve any of our problems. But many people don't care. I think we all have this cute assumption that everyone

who lives in the U.S. or was born in the U.S. favors individualism, private property rights, gun rights, freedom of speech, religious freedom. Why? Why do we have the assumption that every person who you meet on the street just believes in standard core American values that I just listed? And maybe they have a different perspective on minimum wage which should be $10 or $15. No. You have a lot of people who subscribe to a fascist perspective or to

a Stalinist perspective not because they're bad people because they have generally a different world view than you may have or I may have. So we have this assumption that everyone is out there just thinking and believing and wanting the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, gun rights, and individualism, private properties, the freedom to send your child to school and to get an education and to work. And we'll debate, you know, if we need to have a lockdown for a week or... No, many people do not want that.

They absolutely do not care. They do not share the same values as you do on these basic American principles that were popular a generation or two ago. So then you tell them, well, you know, you can't debate it. Okay. They don't care. They don't care. I'll just stress this too, and it's the establishment Democrats for the most part. My favorite example is that when you ask an independent voter or Republican how the economy is doing, they'll say fairly bad.

Democrats say fairly good. But if you actually look at the data, it's like really bad. Yeah, but this I think this can be influenced by what you said is, you know, it's become a popular buzzword, the tribalism. What I'm saying is they're adhering to the authority, the media. The media and the system and the political establishment say it's true, so it's true. The critical thinkers who are like, show me the evidence. This is, I think this is why you get the culture war break apart with left and right as it is. These establishment Democrat types will just say something today and then contradict themselves tomorrow.

They'll scream and cry about a conservative doing something and then do it themselves because they don't care about principle. They care about following the authority. Correct. You know, I wrote this on Twitter a couple of times. One of the people who attended the Obama birthday party released videos, and she apologized for releasing the video. Erykah Badu, right?

Yeah. So I asked on Twitter, why do you need to apologize? I think other people should release videos too. If you think that you have done something which is okay, release the video. But they want to hide it. They want to deny that they attended this event. Why? Probably because there are people there who favor lockdowns,

who favor vaccine passports. It has nothing to do with, not because they're concerned about coronavirus. They have a certain worldview of how societies need to be run. And it doesn't mean that they personally fear coronavirus if, yes, they wouldn't go to the event. So being a fan of, let's say, the vaccine passport to many of those people is not out of fear of coronavirus. Many people are worked up.

To many people, it's just they think that this is how society should run. There should be a stricter regime about vaccines. So those people have no problem going to an event next day without a mask or something. It's because they don't have a problem with it. The rule's for the even not. Yeah, correct. There's a simple question that I think all of you can benefit from. Ian. Yes, Tim. Do you think vaccines are good things? Well, I mean, a vaccine done right, yes, is a good thing. Do you think that people should have the choice to make medical decisions for themselves? Often.

There are situations where emergencies may require that people submit to authority for the greater good, which is terrifying to say. Are you saying yes or no? Should people have the right to choose medical decisions about what they do with their body? Sometimes. So the answer is no. You it's rights are given you know so people should you're saying people should not have the choice i think that in a free society um yeah but if you know you're you're under martial lockdown and like cholera breaks out and you you're able to vaccinate all the the people.

Then you kind of got to do it without asking. Absolutely. It's really simple. Ian, you're an authoritarian. And sometimes there's, sometimes there's value to staging authority. Yeah.

Uh, libertarians typically don't take authoritarian positions. What are you going to do if you have 7,000 people and they're all have a vicious virus that's mutating and making them bleed from their eyes and you have the vaccine but what are you going to go ask everyone for their permission yes that's not how it works dude that's not how smallpox worked that's that's sometimes there's an emergency where right so you accept authoritarianism sometimes but the problem i have is i think people are overblowing covid can i can i hold on hold on hold on like the challenge with you ian is you can't just

you're trying to get a black and a white answer, man. That's just not the way things work. People should have a right to choose their own medical decisions, and they should go talk to doctors about what makes sense for them. What about the smallpox vaccine? I still think people have a right to choose for themselves. They didn't, though. That was, like, forced on people. Okay.

The issue now is that with the mandates, the argument is whether or not people have a choice. You have establishment, even some neocon types, who are saying people should not have a choice at all. And they're coming out on media and saying do everything possible to harm them until they capitulate. That's authoritarianism. Is COVID dangerous enough that it warrants giving people no choice? That's your private medical decision with your doctor. That's my belief over the structure of society. That's how I think we should look at diseases.

Right, right, Ian. It's really simple. It is. You're an authoritarian. I mean, not generally, but I understand the value of authority from time to time. People who fall on the libertarian spectrum typically say things like, okay, so a libertarian approach to this would be like my opinion. And the one I genuinely thought you'd have is vaccines are fantastic, amazing technology. In fact, I'm looking over the mRNA stuff.

It sounds really, really fascinating and amazing. And I can't tell someone what they should do with their body because I believe that we have to respect the individual's right to choose. So what we can do is private businesses. If they say they want to mandate masks, I'm like, dude, I'm not going to make an issue of a mom and pop shop saying you can't come in my store within reason because, as we already mentioned, with civil rights, I think there are limits. So I certainly respect the power of authority in certain instances, which is why I said typically when I say I'm left libertarian, I'm not big L libertarian. I say I'm usually liberal because I actually think some things I agree with you in that sense. Yeah, but Tim, I think you're setting it up. It's like asking someone, is food a good thing or not?

Tell me, is food good or not? Yeah, it is good. Oh, so you favor obesity. No, I don't favor obesity. Oh, so you want people to die from hunger. I think so much of the discussion, again, I'm glad how you framed the question because I think people need to think what they believe, whether it's Ian or your audience or myself and you. But a lot of times the question, as I just said, it is do you favor food or not? If you favor food.

So the same thing is, is the concept of vaccines good? Amazing. Have you seen how the world has changed over the years? Of course. But then, therefore, because it's like, do you believe in science or you don't believe in science? If you don't believe in science, why do you fly an airplane? Well, just because I believe in science doesn't mean every clown that puts together a couple of wires, I'm going to

sit onto it and take off. Right, so in this particular instance, I'm not saying in the greater of everything related to Ian's character, and the point I was trying to get to is, when I mention civil rights, I say, I think it's good that there were mandates and that there was respect for

certain instances of authority. The issue is that you've got people who are looking at the media and saying, I want to see the information, I want to see the data, and make that choice for myself and how that plays into the greater society and the decisions we make. And then you have people saying, shut up and do as you're told. Because, as I said before, they are authoritarian or they are Stalinists. They are fascist. They are not – they don't think or believe that people should have a certain level of liberty and choice.

And therefore, they push against it. You know, a point that I try to make often is, you know, now that it's an emergency, we need to have lockdowns, this and that. What I try to argue is the authoritarian, the despot, do you think he goes out there and announces, hi, everyone, I'm a despot. I want to take away your rights. Stay home tonight. It doesn't work this way.

It's always packaged that it's an emergency or it's for good of country. So I'm not saying that someone who favors a lockdown due to coronavirus is the same as a murderous death spot from 50 years ago. I'm saying that being in an emergency isn't the reason to suspend rights because we need the rights because it's an emergency. When it's an emergency, when you want to challenge, that's exactly when we need it. I want to make sure I clarify the point I'm trying to make. There are people who have told me that I'm a fascist because I said, I think taxes are fine.

I've had libertarians be like, taxation is theft. And I'm like, I think not paying taxes is theft. Because from my perspective, we enter into the society with 16 years of free life where you get roads, you get water, you get all of the regulations,

you get police, fire department, EMS, and you pay no taxes because you're not working. Your parents are. And then when you get a job, they say, after you're free 16 years, you can now start paying into the system. I'm being somewhat facetious and just making an argument, but people have said that's authoritarian or fascistic to force me to pay for you and all that stuff. And I'm like, then stop coming to my town and driving in my roads or whatever. The point I'm making is it's less about the principles of being free and letting people do whatever they want, which libertarians certainly are. Like big L libertarians are basically like, do your thing, leave me alone.

I'll do my thing. I'll leave you alone. It's personal moral ethics, I suppose. When an individual says, I don't think you should be able to say great on the basis of race, it's not so much about the principle of freedom. It's about what weighs more in your mind morally. I think rejecting someone from a business who lives in the community and pays taxes is wrong if you're doing it for arbitrary reasons. Other people think I'm imposing authority over them.

So that's the challenge. The challenge – real quick, the point I'm making is, Ian, if I say, do you believe this, people will say, you're an authoritarian because you believe we should have these measures. Even if on most things you're like, people should be free to do what they want. When I look at vaccines, I'm thinking about my – I got six when I was a baby. Hepatitis B, I think. I didn't ask for it. Authoritarianism reigns supreme.

I was just injected as a baby and probably for the greater good. The MMR and so forth. The MMR, measles, mumps, and rubella would kill people. I wasn't killed by it. I was vaccinated against my will. I didn't even have willpower at that point in my life. So in those cases, yeah, man, I guess I support that from what I know, parental authority too, but, I mean, this is like military government.

We've got to keep people alive beyond some families. You're not going to to a doctor and a doctor giving them advice. You're not going to make it seem like you're throwing a gulag. I think it's more about the science. It's so vague. But the reality, if you're going to be a military commander and decide life and death for your troops and the enemy's troops, you need to know. You need to do it right. But, again, a lot of people don't care. For example, I want to give an interesting data point. In New York City, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced essentially vaccine passports to go to gyms and to restaurants.

If you're vaccinated against coronavirus, you'll be able to go into a restaurant. If not, you won't be able to. I have two questions. One question based on two data points. According to Newsday, which is a Long Island newspaper, they asked the city, and the city said that in the first six and a half months of this year, only 1.1% of coronavirus cases were reinfections. That's not my data point. It's not pulled out of a hat. Again, Newsday reported it in the name of the New York City Health Department, saying that only 1.1% coronavirus cases in New York City

the first six and a half months of the year were reinfections, which would probably tell you that as of now, I don't know for how long, as of now, natural immunity from coronavirus is holding up quite high again. As of now, based on the numbers from New York City from reinfections. On the flip side, we see Israel, which vaccinated its population before most other countries, is already pushing a third shot. There they have Pfizer, already pushing a third shot for people who are 50 or above.

That is because over time, the vaccine efficiency starts going down. How long, how strong, I don't know, but it starts going down. More than half people last week in Israel in hospitals for coronavirus serious cases were people who were fully vaccinated. So I have two data points. One showing, based on the Newsday story out of New York City data, that natural immunity is holding up quite strong for quite a while. At the same time, the vaccine, while it helps, it's starting to wane.

So why do you have a passport in New York City based on vaccination and not based on immunity? If a person can show that they still have a certain level of antibodies. But didn't they say negative tests? What is it? Negative tests allow you entry as well. I think that's only in certain institutions, but I don't think, I'm not sure. but let's say in Israel where they have the vaccine passport, they do count if you were infected in the past and still have a certain level of antibodies. So in other words, I'm more worked up by the New York City Council Health Committee in the city council. And I personally am more worked up about him not giving any legitimacy to people who have been affected

while he's all in for the vaccine passport, even as we see that the efficiency starts falling over time. It helps. It brought down the numbers, but it starts falling over time. So why is this the only path? Again, you shouldn't have a pass at all, but if you're going to have a pass, why are you not

playing even-handed? Why are you playing games? They're gaining power and authority. They're lazy, sub-intellect. I mean, most people are not. It's both. It's both.

It's power and authority, or it's just lazy. It's too complex. Yeah, it's like what Ethan Klein said on H3H3 Podcast. Just look at this easy way to think. If you notice before, I want to get to another point. If you notice before, when I said that natural immunity from coronavirus is holding up pretty high based on the Newsday story based from New York City data of the first six and a half months of the year,

why am I saying it like in one sentence? It's because if I don't, whoa, Yossi's just making up stuff. He's saying stuff. People don't even want to have a conversation. They'll shut you down for misinformation, even if I'm giving you data from the New York City Health Department, as

written by Newsday. When the Democrats say science, they're actually saying consensus. Yeah, so you tweet that too. Yeah, because the scientists who oppose these ideas are getting banned and shut down. People like Dr. Brett Weinstein, for instance, who is an evolutionary biologist who certainly knows a bit

about the area. I'm not going to pretend like he's a virologist or anything, but they'll just say, he's wrong, shut him up. Science said this. Well, I don't know, the other science guy said something too. But I'll always end with this. A lot of people want to believe what they think makes the most sense for them based on their worldview.

That doesn't always mean that you're going to be right. And I take a look at the current system, which I'm not a big fan of the government. I don't trust them all the time. But I certainly don't think they want people to die. Look, there's probably evil people somewhere and sometimes they do bad things. But I think for't think they want people to die. Look, there's probably evil people somewhere and sometimes, and they do bad things. But I think for the most part, we'll wrap this up and go to Super Chats.

I really do think if you find a good doctor, someone who pays attention to the news and is well-read in their field, they're going to give you great advice. And become a doctor. Yes, yes, seriously. If you've got to be a doctor, be a doctor. But, Tim, I don't think the baseline is if people want you to die or not. I have a problem, again, not as a problem, but I'm perplexed why someone who is a normal person, a normal person would probably have a cell number. Why would he dismiss the fact that the efficiency of the vaccine is dropping over time

as you see a third shot is being pushed. So why are you dismissing this? Why are you dismissing – Well, hold on. Why are you dismissing – there was one study I think came out. We had it on tipguest.com showing that AstraZeneca and Pfizer – I think it was Pfizer – have actually maintained their efficiency according to a study on people in the US. So the issue is you'll read some stories and then you'll say, how come they're dismissing this?

And then I'll read a story. But I have an answer. But I have an answer because Pfizer was pushed in Israel earlier than probably any other country or one of the first few. So Israel is seeing the outcome of Pfizer ahead of other countries,

which is Pfizer works. The vaccine, the double shots work. And therefore, the numbers came down. And even Florida, everyone was busy the last few weeks. Oh, Florida, Florida. Florida's death rate this year in the summer, death numbers from coronavirus were much lower than at the same time last year. So the debate is not if it works.

The question is for how long it works and how effective it is and why you're dismissing people who, for now, again, it may change. And I think it will be worrisome if it becomes more widespread that as of now, based on New York City data, only 1.1% cases the first half of the year, a little bit more than that, were reinfections. Why are you dismissing that? Of those people, how many of them were vaccinated? Of the 1.1%? Yeah. Of the people that received COVID, only 1.1% were reinfected.

Do you know how many of the Y number were? No, the reporter mentions that he asked the city and they didn't answer. But the city has a criteria. If someone had coronavirus 90 days or more before the current infection, that would be counted as a reinfection. And for six and a half months in New York City, it's not a small place, six and a half months, city data as reported by Newsday less than two weeks ago, only 1.1% were reinfections, which is an amazing number. So if the CDC says that people with the vaccine can have coronavirus and can carry it, so how does the pass help you? You're giving a pass to someone who can spread corona it's over the rails and

again i'm not bothered so much by the insanity of the policies which take away the freedoms of the fact that people do not want to they're not serious about having a conversation they don't care they just hung up on something and finish all right let's go to super chats if you haven't already smash that like button send in those super chats go to timcast.com become a member we're gonna have a members only segment coming up around 11 or so p.m. That's when it goes up. But let's read some of these super chats. We got Flimsy Fox says,

We as a nation have a history of not doing what we say we're going to do internationally. The issue with the Taliban in Afghanistan is of our own making. Biden backed out, but Trump should have put the date before the next term. Yeah? Let's see. Pukka says,, hey Tim, I'm a member of your website. Recently I've been getting this message saying my account is inactive. What's happening? Send an email to

members at timcast.com. It could be that your card doesn't work. It's really amazing. That's customer service right there, isn't it? You get to message the show, and I tell you, right to you, if your card didn't go through properly, then't it? You get to message the show, and I tell you, right to you. If your card didn't go through properly, then you'll get an active message. So you can email members at timcast.com, and then someone will get you sorted.

Taylor Norheim says, this has happened. Happened before, and it will happen again. All right. Mike G says, Tim, Ian was spot on about DeFranco last week. I used to work for him about six years ago, and he was one of the worst bosses I've ever had. So arrogant. Really? What did I say?

You were saying something about him being arrogant. In the early days of YouTube, I would make internet videos, and we would go on stickum.com and talk. And Phil would come into my chat rooms, and we'd hang out. And then I met him at 7-7 up at YouTube Live up in San Francisco. I always really liked him. He's really smart, really fearless, but I don't know about his politics. I haven't talked to him in like a decade. Yeah, I've met him a couple times, and the thing we did with talking about Philip DeFranco is that all of a sudden now he's posting what he's really mean.

I don't know what the right word is for it. It's like hate-filled. Like, just not solution-oriented, not calm, not rational, just telling people F you, and he's been on the wrong side of a decent amount of news stories. Like, Covington Kids is a really good example. And I'm just like, what happened to us, you know? Like, how have we become this, like, maybe I shouldn't say us. Maybe I should say what happened to him.

I don't know. No, no, it's good. Take responsibility. It's a lot of this texting, I think. I agree. I think social media is driving us all insane. Yeah, but look, I'll address that too. When I said we're sitting here talking about negative news, I'm going to be fair.

We started the vlog specifically to make fun stuff, to counteract that. It's on the website. So you're not just going to be inundated with all this negativity all the time. Sometimes you're going to see us playing with chickens, we had baby chicks hatch and we're going to be filming that stuff and playing D&D. We're doing a Tales of Intrigue paranormal mystery show. We're trying to create a balance of the information people get so they're not

inundated by this. But so many people have just become vile, nasty people. I think people are vile and nasty by nature. It's just we see it more because information travels quicker these days. Yep. And infamy is a little bit like popular

on social media, you know, going crazy and dropping a bomb, so to speak, figuratively speaking. I think people like it. Making equal amounts of money, being infamous or being famous these days, it seems like. Kyle Miller says, when I said that Kabul is going to be the Saigon of our generation on Friday, I did not expect it to happen over the weekend.

Wasn't that wild? That was, Kyle, you nailed it. Kyle Miller with the prediction. But I think a lot of people were seeing the lines being drawn. They knew what was coming. And here we are. It's a bummer, man. Michael McCord said, did I just seerian curry in the live chat lol yes you did

adrian how's it going what's up we gotta come back on the show sometime yeah you love to travel david aloha says why would you ever conclude djt would bomb when trump has never wanted to sacrifice lives if it was an accidental casualty it was an accidental casualty when he took out Soleimani. With Trump, I'm not – yes, he called off that airstrike on Iran. He said he didn't want – the amount of lives that would be lost would be bad. When the Taliban is overrunning towns and there's active combat, do you think that Trump wouldn't be like, we need an airstrike on enemy combatants storming a city and threatening to kill? Trump wouldn't want like, we need an airstrike on enemy combatants storming the city and threatening to kill. Trump wouldn't want a Benghazi. Especially if they are between two cities there in some desert or something, smoke them out, as Bush would say. I think Trump, absolutely. Trump, one of the first things he did as president was he ordered a commando raid in

Yemen, which resulted in the death of an eight-year-old American girl. We can pretend like Trump was the hero who was going to save all these lives, but he did a lot of things that many other presidents did. I just preferred the fact that he was like, I'm getting out of Afghanistan and then started working on ending this stuff, getting our troops out of Syria. I don't think any of them are perfect. I don't think Trump is perfect. And I think the problem with Trump and with even some of Obama's early orders is that they've got this permanent government, people who are appointed to bureaucratic positions, and then you get a president who sits down and says,

now, I want to do X, and they go, read this. Then the president reads it and says, what should we do? And they say, trust me, we'll do this. And the president says, you got it, and signs off on it. Trump was probably going, at first, okay, I understand, okay, and then finally started getting angry, no, no, no, we're not going to do this, no, I and they started lying to him then they started lying to the american people trump wanted to make moves and they wouldn't let him the other presidents biden probably just says

sure whatever you know you guys know better than i do i don't want any trouble then you end up with a president like obama killing a bunch of americans which he did by the way all right broskadoodle says i disagree with how trump would have handled it only because we didn't let the original deal play out. What he would do in this exact situation is irrelevant because you're playing the hypothetical. I actually completely agree with that. And that's the challenge I mentioned earlier. We have no frame of reference. Trump isn't presiding over this, and we can only make assumptions based on what we think he would do.

So it's really hard to – Based on what he said or did in other instances. And maybe it would have been different. We don't know. That's why I say... Okay, well, if this is the way we discuss things, then have political debates. You can be shut down because we don't know. The person's not there, and you don't have a point of reference. I think we have to some extent.

No, I think it's fair to point out that based on what Trump did, we can make assumptions about what we think he would do. Correct. But we can't have an argument with ourselves in our minds about a president who's not in office. It's not about being certain

that he would do it, but it's, you know, to entertain it as a possibility, if not a probability. Yeah, worth debating, but not worth getting emotional about. You've got all these Democrats saying it's Trump's fault,

and I'm like, Trump's not the president. All right. No, Democrats saying it's Trump's fault then biden goes out and says it's my credit so but he did say i inherited this from trump and i had to make a hard decision but the buck stops with me and i'm like all right fine i'll take it you know sean debbie says trump was adamant about not leaving arms and equipment as a free-for-all that is true and there was a statement from mike pom Pompeo where he said that, I think it was Trump or I can't remember who, someone said to the Taliban that the full force of America will rain down on them if they violate the deal or things like that. And I think with Trump in office, the Taliban were like, all right, all right, we're going to get something out of this.

And this dude's going to, okay, we don't want to mess with this guy. He's crazy. Okay, with Joe Biden, they're like, he's sleeping, run. And that's what you get, man. Jason Strait says cowardly of Biden to address the nation at 4 p.m., a busy time of day when no one is available to watch. In any case, anything he says rings hollow, as he's made it clear many times that he's not my president. Yeah, a lot of people said's not my president. Yeah. A lot of people said the same thing about Donald Trump.

The issue is I can understand that Joe Biden doesn't represent, in my opinion, everyone in this country. And that's like I got to slow down. I'll give you the example. When COVID restrictions were being lifted in Texas and Florida, Biden came out and said we might have to have more lockdowns and things like that, as if Texas and Florida did not exist at all, as if these red states didn't exist. And so I think he's been doing a very, very bad job in that regard. And I think Jason is correct. A lot of people pointed out it was a 345 scheduled press conference when people are at work. Are you serious? 8 p.m.

Later in the evening when people have a chance to watch it. Yeah, but I think in 2021 people would just take out their phone and watch it online or something. On demand. Yeah, basically. Sorta, I can't read your last name, says, Why wouldn't Islamic people, who have been taught their entire lives that Westerners are bad, according to the Quran, embrace Western democracy? American politicians, media, and military officers have no respect or insight into other cultures. I don't know a lot about Islam.

I think that one of the tenets of Islam is if you're backed into a corner, fight with everything you have, and they feel like they've been pushed into a corner economically as the military-industrial complex is spread throughout the region. This is important. All right, go ahead. No, no, no. I think it's possible that the religious perspective plays a role to some people, to some actors, but I think we can't dismiss the human flow of things as the example that I gave earlier about Canada. Imagine growing up 20 years and having Canadian troops making checkpoints at every corner and one day

they play ball with you and the next day they arrest your uncle because he's supposedly a bad guy and your uncle's in prison for two years. I think this puts the U.S. in an impossible position when they move into an area and then what?

Alright, Jason Diaz says, who played Civilization not to conquer anyone? Yo, cultural victories, man. Dude, science. Launch that spaceship, man. I keep thinking about this. If we had conquered, in Civilization, if you ever played Civ, it's the computer game. It's a great game. It's a world

conquest. You can do it by culture. You can do it by science. You can do it by... You build a civilization. It's a religion. You can do it by conquest. You don't have to conquer the world through conquest. You can do it by culture. You can do it by science. You can do it by religion. You can do it by conquest. You don't have to conquer the world through conquest. You can do it through religion or culture. The computer games that I played was Pac-Man or Game Boys 20 years ago. If you were to conquer a desert

mountain country like Afghanistan, you'd have to spend so much money building libraries, sewers, marketplaces, universities. You'd spend so much money building libraries uh sewers uh marketplaces universities i mean you'd spend so much money bankrupt yourself like seven times it would be so i see how it's just an impossible win using the civilization metaphor well i've like new civ you go to an area that's like a desert region there's no resources you just just raise it to the ground and leave no your culture victory you i don't like conquest. I like culture of victory.

It's where it's basically in the game. You export your culture, your movies, your music, and then other countries are adopting your behaviors. And then your borders expand and press on theirs. And then people are like, that's way cooler than this. And then they rebel or abandon. Anyway, we got an actual important super chat here. No offense, Jason. I just mean it was a funny hokey one, but this one is actually interesting. John Hutto says,

the 200K number for Taliban fighters comes from a January 2021 West Point counterterror center volume 14 issue one report, quoting a BBC report in 2018 from Dr. Dawood Azami and a tweet I tagged lids on. Very interesting that the initial source goes back to 2018, which would suggest that much of this growth happened under Obama and Biden. And by changing the source, it now makes it appear as though the latest development happened under Donald Trump. Love how media is played, isn't it? Shepard in studio says Cassandra's comment about Biden's speech was incredibly short-sighted. It was sculpted to achieve exactly the result she gave.

Perhaps. But I think there's a rhetorical victory in the president coming out and repeating the words of what many anti-war activists have said for a long time about the wasted time and energy and money in Afghanistan. And it's vindication. It's getting them to admit that the anti-war crowd was right the whole time, and they believe the same thing. Granted, Biden screwed this one up. I think Trump would have handled it very differently, but, you know. All right, let's see. Rick Howell says, Ian, we didn't see a lot of video during Vietnam.

There were only three channels, no internet. Much of the video came out after the war. There was a lot of self-censorship then, too. Gore was not the huge draw. It is now. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating.

Okay, someone's got the correction for me. I stand corrected. Bill Hughes says they were not doing jumping jacks. They were being taught how to do the side straddle hop, which is a government jumping jack. Huh. Okay. So harder for no reason. No, but I'm glad we have the specific name for it.

Side straddle. All right. Weird. I think that was a joke. Was that a joke? No, it's side straddle. Oh. Yeah, yeah.

These people, they were trying to teach him how to do, you know, side straddle hops. These people, this one guy, he's going like this. Like, literally twitching. I was like, what are you doing with your hands? Like, you watched the guy, right? You know, look,'t have people who are not educated and who are impoverished they're just not going to be made for this kind of stuff all right martin edgar says look up pictures of afghanistan in the 70s before the russian afghan war women wore jeans and not a burqa to be seen afghanistan has a close proximity to china

tactically it would have been advantageous to remain. Interesting. Matt Bowler says, Tim, these people do have social cohesion and culture, religion. However, the conflict between religious groups is so fundamentally rooted, it will seemingly forever spur problems. I agree. Brandon Tom says, South Korea has been resisting invasion since June 25th, 1950, and has been grateful for our help ever since. Korea is

different and awesome. I certainly think so as well. I think with Korea, it was its massive force of communism taking over all these countries, and we said, hey, don't take over these countries, and then we get involved in these conflicts. Though I'm not a fan of what happened with a lot of... I gotta say, I gotta be honest.

Vietnam, awful. But for my family, like, South Korea existing is, like, a really great thing. So I'm happy about that. I, you know, I don't live in Korea. I'm not from Korea, but... What was it like with the Russians being like, we're going to test a bunch of our weapons and the U.S. is like, cool, we'll test a bunch of ours. Let's use Korea to do it. What do you mean?

Like, is that what that war... It was a proxy war. Like, were they just testing weapons and using the korean people expansion of communism same as vietnam that's what they call that's what they said but what was it really it was just an arms right was vietnam the same thing yeah pretty much no i think it was the chinese and the americans using their weapons communists were spreading across the asian continent and the u.s was like we can ignore this because they're not our countries but then what happens in 30 years when the communists control all of asia europe and north africa and then they're impossible to stop and then they start cutting off our supplies and then the u.s falls

to these dictators yeah we have to go now otherwise they grow too much but it's possible and probably even likely i would say that it was more than one reason or more than one like positive outcome that could come out of it you get to test your weapons and you get to stop communism all right let's see uh scallum says those were ana soldiers then there are nds and kpf soldiers more skilled but needed to be babysat to function most afghans are sheep people the smarter ones left or leave as soon as they can yeah they're like farmers right they just mostly yeah it. I can't blame them for not knowing how to fight or being able to understand it.

I just think the government, like the U.S. should have realized, like, hey, wait a minute, this isn't going to work. Well, they get all their opium and now they're out? Did they extract all the opium or something?

Yeah, what was it? The Taliban banned the opium stuff? Is that true? I don't know if that's true, though. They banned masks? Is that right? I don't know if that's true. They banned some, like, critical race theory or something stupid. Maybe that's a meme, true? I don't know if that's true, though. They banned masks? Is that right? I don't know if that's true. They banned some, like, critical race theory or something stupid.

Maybe that's a meme, dude. I don't know. It's a meme, dude. All right, let's see. No, they banned the vaccine, I think. Tovid Benson says, How can you expect the U.S. to teach community identity and create cultural cohesion to a foreign entity if we are abolishing

those same values and cohesion in the U.S. The U.S. did not make an effort to understand the local tribal cultures to find what would create cohesion. Nor will they do it here in the U.S. when you get people like General Mark Milley being like, I want to understand white rage. Yeah, you'll alienate 92% of the country. Good job.

But what he said at the time, I don't think he really wants to understand it. He just said what fits in narrative because he wants to fit into Washington. Right. And so much of the discussion these days is just people just going along with whatever flows. This is a story from the week Taliban bans COVID-19 vaccine in Paktia. Hmm. Interesting.

All right. We got George Butler says, hey, Tim and crew, do you think POTUS should send social workers instead of troops to Afghanistan? Perhaps. Good idea. And they can teach people. Seven Cog says, Failure to defend Taiwan will be the U.S.'s Suez Canal moment, the point at which the world knows beyond doubt the U.S. is no longer top dog.

And I think it will happen. I do. You can't stop it, though. I mean, you could, but the problem is Mark Milley. You know, and I don't mean him literally just he's the only problem. I mean, you look at the things he says and the way he behaves, and it just shows the spinelessness, the weak-mindedness. I'll tell you this. I think a large portion of American leadership has almost no mental fortitude.

And the fact that Mark Milley is in the position he is just shows that the emperor has no clothes. It's weird that feeling like we have too much to lose. We don't want to fight because we don't want to lose what we have. We're so elevated above other people that we don't want to lose our stuff, whereas they don't have that. So they're like, I'll fight. I've got nothing to lose. So you don't want to lose our stuff, whereas they don't have that. So they're like, I'll fight. I got nothing to lose. So you don't want to get too far ahead of everybody else. Justin Middleton says, Tim, big fan, but I don't understand this.

You often quote Edmund Burke. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Why doesn't this apply globally, considering your stance on foreign intervention? I don't think the Taliban are going to be an international cabal that, you know, take over the world. But that's why I was saying about the Soviet Union, I understand why the U.S. was doing what it did. And I'm certainly happy that South Korea exists and was defended, although the U.S. wasn't able to defend all of Korea. It's tough. Vietnam was a major failure, uh the we lost there but ultimately

the soviet union fell i look at afghanistan and i'm like what are we what are we worried about with taliban like i understand 9-11 and all that stuff for sure but that was specifically targeting a group of people but that you know that's that's a line that's a line the president said today like technically we could have left afghanistan 10-15 years ago and if we can't leave today we can leave in 15-20 years from now either. It's like, what are we trying to accomplish at this point? Yeah, he said, we went after Osama bin Laden, we got him. Okay, there you go.

I think what Ron Paul often said was, we shouldn't have declared war, we should have declared mark and reprisal against this specific group, and then sought to operate in certain territories through agreements with those governments. I think, yeah, I think all in all, I think the mess up with Afghanistan is not so much going out. It's, I think, how things will play out going forward.

I think the hasty withdrawal, the way it was done, is more like an abandonment. And I think this may have long-term consequences. In other words, the deficiency is not in actually leaving Afghanistan. I think people can understand that. I think if the U.S. were to leave Afghanistan in some sort of a more orderly fashion, using the last few months to do it and not having these images the last 72 hours, I don't think it would undermine the U.S., the role of the U.S. in the world. So I don't think leaving in itself is going to be a problem. I think how it's done and,

you know, not being able to keep a government going, spending so much money in the military and turning it back on people who help you, I think those things will be a disaster. All right. Black Rock Beacon says, Trained Afghan commandos while in SF. They were competent. Also trained regulars and some older guys who were Mujahideen were very good. But many couldn't aim a gun. As with most armies, the bulk are the regulars.

Taliban are mostly seasoned fighters on par with commandos. If that's true, that's crazy. Even if they had 85,000 guys who were trained men. Yeah, I don't know. The U.S. wasn't going to be able to hold that. Alright, let's see.

Ah, here's a very important switch. WorkingRageaholic says, Oi, Tim, can you talk about Yuri Bezmenov? Dude warned us years ago about what was going to happen, but no one listened. You ever see that Yuri Bezmenov? Dude warned us years ago about what was going to happen But no one listened You ever see that Yuri Bezmenov video? Yeah, Ian, yes

We should make everyone watch it every day Have you ever been asked about that video 25 times? You know we have The thing that appears on the screen that says share this Like this Subscribe We should make another one where it just says yes we've seen the Yuri Bezmenov video. Just include it in it.

Is that guy still kicking? Is he alive still? He was old in the 90s. I don't know, but I appreciate all the super chats of people constantly bringing him up because he was warning us. And when people bring it up and we get to say it, more people will learn about it.

Yeah, he told us about how the long game, basically the communist long game of like, they get into your culture and then they start ceding dissent for 20 years. And then they sort of kind of, he was telling us about this in the 90s and saying it's happening right now that's right moosey moose says i urge everyone watch a video on youtube titled mass psychosis how an entire population becomes mentally ill they talk about a killing of the mind modern day totalitarian and how parallel systems can be used to defeat it i've seen that

video it is really really, really good and it is incredibly well done. It is called Mass Psychosis, How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill. You've got to check it out. You should watch it. It basically talks about...

I'll just leave it there. Thanks. Watch it and you'll be like, hmm, this sounds familiar. Oh, boy. Oh, yeah. And it's like a big channel doing an educational video, like talking philosophy.

You'll have to look it up. I don't know. Okay. All right. Adjudim says, shout out to OJPAC, Yassi's nonprofit org. Oh, yeah. Do you have a nonprofit? Yeah.

Yeah, what is it? What do you do? Our mission is to fight bigotry against the Orthodox Jewish community and to advocate for civil rights, civil liberties that affect our community. For example, last year we pushed a lot of data and advocacy in terms of restoring patient rights in hospitals. I think, not I think, until today, most hospitals do not have regular visitation restored due to coronavirus.

And I think it's important for people who believe in family values to have the ability to visit family members. It's very important for their recovery, so we advocate it on that front. We also pushed a lot of advocacy to open schools last year in New York because, again, unlike most of the U.S., I think like only 21% of the U.S. population is under the age of 18. In our community, it's 60%. Can you believe it? Wow.

It's, you know, three-fifths. It's huge. So when you didn't have school for a week, you can imagine how parents and families are going crazy and how important school is. It's not, oh, you know, you have a child here and there. You have like the more than half of the population is stuck in time. So, you know, those are things. And also we were, one of the lawsuits that were brought against Como to permit people to go to synagogues, the congregations, was something that we helped coordinate. You know, that lawsuit ultimately was sidelined because two other lawsuits from, I think, the Catholics in Brooklyn,

also from another major Orthodox organization, advanced to the Supreme Court. So this lawsuit didn't take off, but we were busy on the front. So that's where we would advocate a lot on these issues. And then on the defensive front, I think Cuomo a time, for a while last fall, and also Bulda Blasio, the mayor of New York City, they had a disproportionate focus on Orthodox Jews as a community

by skewing coronavirus data points. And we push back with press releases, articles, TV appearances, studies and numbers, you know, to keep the conversation going. I think any growing community, especially community that stands out, I mean, you walk in the street, somebody's Orthodox Jewish, you can see it.

I think it's important to get information out there, either in a proactive or a reactive fashion, and we try doing that between the tweets. All right. Emily Mower says, That's a good name for a book, by the way. Did Ian just say rights are given? The government does not grant us our rights.

The Constitution protects our rights that we inherently have from the government. LOL. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we tell ourselves. The myth of our time. Come on. It's enforced by law. What do you mean?

All our rights that we say are God-given. Come on. That's not... You are a product of your society. Our society is built to protect those rights that we gave ourselves. What do you mean? The United States is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not like we accidentally

have all these rights. We had to choose to create these for ourselves. He's saying an interesting point. He's saying that you need to have a government that agrees to protect your rights. If not, those rights are taken away by government. So it's... Oh, interesting.

I guess we're by a giant bear or whatever. Yeah, government. So it's... Oh, interesting. But I guess... Yeah, or by a giant bear or whatever. Yeah, whatever, but it's not... But I think you're missing the point. The rights are not given by government. You know, that's why it's called, I think, negative rights. It's not government gives you. The government doesn't, you know,

you are protected from government taking it away, but that means government is willing not to take it away. So we're still governed by law. I think you're getting semantic again, Ian. She's saying that we all have these rights.

Like, I as an individual believe these rights are mine and you can't take them. You can try. Fortunately, we have a Bill of Rights in this country that protects the rights that I believe I have and have always had. And I do think the government infringes on those rights the government doesn't grant them to us we have them the government just breaks the rules and tries to take them from us all the time and they do yeah all right let's see the last of my kinds is on my birthday i told y'all how i was 31 walking with a cane last week took ian's advice and got

some collagen thanks bio trust keep it up. Keep it up, Shimcast. Dude, check out what is it? SoCal Chiropractic. Ace Thayer, man. This 70-year-old man came in, bent over on a walker, and he cracked his neck, helped him stand up straight, and the dude's off the walker.

Interesting. You can do it, too. Woot, due for you, says, I have counted Tim's exasperated sighs at Ian's answers. It's over 9,000. Love you, Ian, but sometimes you make me bash my skull against a brick wall. That's why I'm here, baby. Love you too. All right.

Andrew S. says, This one made me a fan of Yossi. Great guest. Absolutely. All right. We'll just go. So you're the one. Okay.

We'll just grab one more. Very important. Garhant says, So you're the one. Okay. We'll just grab one more, very important. Garhant says, Ian is to the left of Stalin. Someone have Ian do the political compass online. It will be funny to see the look on his face when he realizes it's Kami. Yes. Controlled opposition. We can do this.

All right, everybody. If you haven't already, give a tap to that little like button. Subscribe to this channel. Share the show with your friends if you really like it. Leave us a good review. Leave some comments go to timcast.com become a member because there will be a members only segment coming up it usually goes live around 11 or so p.m so you'll definitely want to check that one out they're always more fun we've had a lot of people say can we make the members only show the main show and i'm like i guess the problem is we get banned

yeah immediately i don't i don't think we say anything that crazy but we're allowed to actually say like here's what youtube would ban us for if we were gonna have this conversation so we try to have them there i guess it kind of sucks in a lot of ways but we're growing the business and we've got a lot of stuff on the way someone super chatted that i said tales of intrigue that is not the name of the show that would be very generic we're i'm just that's generally it because shane who's uh all this stuff, he wrote, like, a mafia murder mystery cult case, which is really awesome. And so we're turning his articles into a show, and then we're going to have his story and then followed by someone from the house, like, hanging out and talking about this stuff. So it would be really cool, like, when he talks about some – when he writes up, like, DMT or whatever, Ian will be – have a conversation with him, and that will be a members-only podcast. So definitely become a member at TimCast.com.

Is there anything you want to shout out, Yossi, before we go? I just want to give you a thanks for giving me the opportunity to appear on your show, and I want to give a shout-out to you. I think some – how old are you, 36? 35. 35. Okay, so younger than me with a year of change. I think it takes a lot of energy and, you know, will to do what you do.

And, you know, to go along with the program, I'm not saying you're a contrarian just for the fun of it, but you have your thoughts, you have your opinions, and you share it. You share it in an interesting way. You bring in guests, you know, to challenge, and you challenge your semi-co-host there. You know, I think you guys, I thought you guys were going to blow. I would have. I restrained myself. Yeah, apparently.

So I think to run a business and to start a business, especially in the commentary world, I think it takes a lot of guts, especially that you never know when haters will try to pile on and then try to – Oh, they do. But pile on in a destructive way and try to de-platform and destroy you. So I think having the opportunity to speak to your audience is what made me take this drive of more than four hours. Thank you for doing that.

So it's not like I walked in here from – I was in the neighborhood. It's a drive of four hours, bus stops each way. And also I wanted to have the ability to strengthen what you do. I appreciate it, man. I think we spoke over the show. A lot of times people like to say, you know, cancel culture is bad. Okay, so if cancel culture is bad, you should be out there and conversing with people who are not part of the machine, people who are out there

who others may try to cancel. And I'm not saying he's a pariah, but I'm just trying to get a point across that from a business perspective and from a policy perspective and from an accomplishment perspective, what Tim is doing is amazing. I appreciate it. Hey, thanks, man. You got it. And it's a benefit for me of being able to be here.

And I wanted to join your show no matter the time that it takes because I think you're doing amazing work. You got a Twitter account? Yeah, I do have a Twitter account which is at Y-O-S-S-I Gestetner. It's Yossi, Gestetner, Y-O-S-S-I, Gestetner. I don't

know why. Tim and I, we don't follow each other. What? We used to follow, we unfollowed. I don't know what happened. I never unfollowed. I get unfollowed from people all the time. Yeah, so, yeah, but. Ron Coleman. You know Ron Coleman? Of course.

I've been unfollowed from him like four times. So Ron, and when I said before that we tried to push a lawsuit, Ron was the attorney on that lawsuit. There you go. And I arranged at the time a major press conference, major, not national TV, but regionally we had all the TV channels there. Yeah, I know Ron very well, and he was actually honored at our event. We have an annual dinner, and he was honored this year for his work for the Orthodox community. Right on. But, yeah, so that's that.

I appreciate the time. It's good to know you, Ian, and I appreciate the inquisitor questions before the show. It's interesting. Oh, yeah, we're talking about religion, talking about Judaism. Yeah, definitely. Is it Hasidism? Hasidicism, Hasidim. Hasidim is the people.

Hasidicism is the way of life. Yeah, we're going to maybe get into it a little bit on the after show. We'll get into it. That's pretty cool. And don't forget to follow the show at TimCastIRL on every platform or whatever. And you can follow me at TimCast. Yeah, I'm at IanCrossland. IanCrossland.net.

Love you. And you guys may follow me on Twitter at SarahPatchLids. And I really appreciate Yossi driving all the way down here. And I'm excited for the after show because we are going to talk about his faith. That's right. We love talking about religion and stuff because it's just the big questions. So make sure you go to TimCast.com, be a member, and we will see you all there. Bye, guys.