Dave Smith: “Israel’s Goals Predict U.S. Wars Better Than Trump’s Instincts” | Impact Theory W. Tom Bilyeu

Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In this powerful and provocative episode, Speaker B sits down once again with Speaker A for a deep dive into some of the most challenging questions facing American foreign policy, the influences shaping US intervention in the Middle East, and the tangled web of economics, lobby groups, and tribal loyalties at play. Together, they unravel the complexities behind America's relationship with Israel, the real power of the so-called Jewish lobby, and the driving forces of the military industrial complex. They explore why money may be the ultimate motivator in politics, why influential lobbies and select interests can impact US strategies abroad, and why it’s essential to resist simplistic narratives—especially when it comes to conspiracy theories and bigotry. In this conversation, Speaker B challenges the idea that Israel alone determines American action in the region, proposing that economic realities and presidential ambitions are equally, if not more, significant. Meanwhile, Speaker A unpacks the multifaceted nature of political influence, the pitfalls of collective blame, and the importance of focusing on economic literacy over tribalism and scapegoating. Get ready for an episode filled with hard truths, historical context, and a call for critical thinking as we ask: Who really pulls the strings in American foreign policy, and what should we be paying attention to if we want to understand our world—and change it for the better? Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription orderSumm: code TOMVIP20 for 20% off your first year at https://summ.com?via=tombilyeu&coupon=TOMVIP20 https://summ.com?via=tombilyeu&coupon=TOMVIP20Monetary Metals: Future-proof your wealth at https://monetarymetals.com/impactAquaTru: 20% off your purifier with code IMPACT https://aquatru.comDuck. Ai: Protect your privacy at https://duck.ai/impactBlinkist: Start your free trial at https://blinkist.com/impactQuince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpodAT&T Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.comIncogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impactShopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu President of the United States, Israel lobby, military industrial complex, war in the Middle East, regime change, neoconservatives, Likud Party, Clean Break strategy, US foreign policy, Trump administration, Iranian relations, Jewish lobby, weapons companies, predictive validity, economic influence, Ashkenazi Jews, K shaped economy, central banking, usury, anti-Semitism, Mossad, intelligence agencies, John Mearsheimer, AIPAC, Venezuela intervention, Saudi war in Yemen, Iran nuclear deal, Biden administration, Greater Israel project, bigotry in politics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:07Speaker 01

  The president of the United States of America has enormous power. Mocking Allah on Easter as you announce total war against the civilian population seems like a dangerous game to me.

• 1:20Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you see as a relationship between the Jewish lobby and the military industrial complex?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Israel is an expansionist state. War is big business. Behind this door is forever war. There's huge money to be made here, and that's what we've been pursuing this whole time.

• 1:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Dave Smith, welcome back.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. It's good to be back with you, brother.

• 1:44Tom Bilyeu?

  It's good to have you. So my goal here is not to debate whether Israel has influence over US foreign policy. I think that it clearly has massive influence. But what I do want to figure out is whether that's the variable with the highest predictive validity for what Trump is doing in Iran. Or whether there's a better model. I think I have something that has higher predictive validity, but I would be very open to seeing that that actually isn't the way and that there's just something I'm missing. So where I want to start is if someone wanted to predict Trump's next move in the Middle East, what do you think is the most important variable that they should be tracking? Is it Israel's goals? Or is it something else?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Essentially, the neoconservatives and the Likud Party and the Israel lobby, more broadly speaking, for at least 30 years, they're openly, their goal has been to remake the Middle East. Like, since the clean break strategy, their goal was like, no, we're not doing Oslo, we're not doing a two-state solution, we're going to remake the surrounding Arab nations, not just Arab nations, but, you know, Persian, the Middle East, Northern Africa, and we're going to remake them and take down the ones that are supporting the Palestinian resistance or supporting Hezbollah. And Donald Trump's goal was to get out of stupid regime change wars in the Middle East. And both of them were very explicit about

• 3:07Speaker 01

  what their goals were. And yet, here we find ourselves in a regime change war, a regime collapse war, that is clearly not in America's interest, clearly not in the region's interest, but it sure did allow Israel to take southern Lebanon in the last few weeks. And so, it seems to me that, yeah, what the lobby wants, what the Israeli government wants, seems to have at least for the last 30 years, been the best predictor of the outcomes. But, look, there's other things in there, too. I mean, look, the fact is part of the reason why the neoconservatives, because, you know, if you remember, I think we might even talked about this last time I was on, but the neoconservatives, I mean, the self-identified neoconservatives

• 3:52Speaker 01

  from the Reagan, Bush Senior, and George W. Bush administration, they weren't old-money guys. They weren't guys from the Council on Foreign Relations, or they weren't the Rockefellers guys. They weren't in that world at all. They were middle-class kids who went to City College in New York City. Like, they, you know, but they made their relationships with the military-industrial complex on their own. And so, of course, war is big business. And, you know, whenever you get on the side of that, you're always going to be... You know, sailing with the wind at your back in in DC.

• 4:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. And how do you see the relationship being between the Jewish lobby, which we're probably gonna have to take a second to define, but we'll get to that in a minute. What do you see as a relationship between the Jewish lobby and the military industrial complex?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you could say, so if you look at like, um, uh, you know, like the guys like Bill Kristol, the neoconservatives who always had like a bunch of different think tanks in Washington, DC. I mean, you can go look at who funds them. This is all public information. It's like all the weapons companies up and down, funding the, they just happen to think like, oh yeah, these neo conservatives who want to fight seven wars have some really good arguments to make or whatever, or like, maybe there's a little bit of perverse incentive structure there. But so I think that in general, in Washington DC, if you're advocating that we fight a whole bunch of wars, you're gonna find weapons companies that are quite happy to to fund your endeavors. And I

• 5:27Speaker 01

  think that's true that if you're advocating for, say, vaccine mandates, you're gonna find a lot of big pharmaceutical companies who want to support what you're doing. So to me, I mean, I think there, obviously, there's always like ideological components to these things. But I really do think that business is what runs the world at the end of the day, and that there's huge money to be made here. You know, there's, if you look at, you know, whatever the numbers are, like since the fall of the Soviet Union, we spent like over $20 trillion on on defense and empire and wars of aggression. You know, there's trillions of dollars that people are making off of that. It's an unreal amount of money. I mean, it's literally, it makes Elon Musk look poor, how much money has been,

• 6:10Speaker 01

  you know, exchanged exchanged around in Washington DC. So, you know, I think all of that's, all of these things are components. It's hard to exactly say how much each factor is, but also, one of the things that's kind of unique about Donald Trump. Is that the guy just has no filter at all, unlike all previous presidents. Then, and that's a gift and a curse, you know, there's things about that that are nice. And there's things about that that are really terrible. But, you know, I mean, look, if, if somebody had just said to you, like, the Adelsons give the president hundreds of millions of dollars and all they care about is Israel and they love Israel more than they love America. And every day they'd go demand things on behalf of, of Israel because that's who they

• 6:54Speaker 01

  identify with, you know, you cannot, these, these billionaire Jews living in America are actually essentially Israeli spies. You'd be like, ah, what was that, like a Nick Fuentes, you know, clip or something that went viral, like, no, that was the president of the United States of America, the one who's doing it right now, just openly says this, just openly acknowledges that. So then it's kind of hard to like, you know, and people still go like, oh, you're blaming the Israel lobby for everything. You're like, what? I mean, I don't know, the guy who's doing it is saying in his own words that that's what's going on here.

• 7:28Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting. So here's why this feels important enough to like really press down the path. So what you just said, as part of it is, there's a whole bunch of influences, hard to know which one is the leading one. That if we just made that statement, I'd be like, I agree wholeheartedly. You also said that we have, um, economics basically runs the world or money runs the world. I can't remember what exact word you used, but basically like, hey, money is the real player here. If you just said that, I would agree totally because that's my punchline is if you want to understand what's happening right now, there's only two things you need to understand. And that is Trump wants to end up on Mount Rushmore completely unironically, like he

• 8:12Tom Bilyeu?

  wants to be the fifth head carved into Mount Rushmore. And then he's going to get there by outpacing the inflationary spiral that we're in because nobody, not Republicans, not Democrats, nobody is going to reduce the budget. So for me.

• 8:31Tom Bilyeu?

  What I'll be attempting to do is basically sharpen that idea or get rid of it based on our time together. So I think you're super insightful on this stuff. But the where I come down is when I look at the way that that every time the world breaks economically, there's a pogrom. Now, is it one for one? Maybe it's not quite one for one, but woo buddy, it gets real close. And so I look at that and I go, okay, why when economics starts to fall apart, do people turn against the Jews and so reliably throughout history? Now, I've got my explanation, which I'll speed run. And then I want to bring it back to this moment in America and how we begin teasing

• 9:16Tom Bilyeu?

  out, okay, there's all these influences, but what are the ones that we really need to pay attention to? So the speed run for me as to why Jews get themselves in trouble historically, reliably, over and over and over. I do subscribe to the it just really makes a lot of sense if Ashkenazi Jews have a slightly higher IQ than the average, that certainly makes my following argument that much easier to swallow. So I do subscribe to that. And then if you're smart, one of the first things you realize is that economics is basically the whole game. And so if you can go in and if you're trying to make things better for you, your family, and you're just being shrewd, I'm not even, I won't even go all the way to selfish. You're just being wise.

• 10:00Tom Bilyeu?

  You're gonna master economics. I would say that to me, I would say that to you, I'd say it to anybody who will listen to me. Go get good at finance. Cool. So they put themselves at the center of that. You've talked very eloquently about the whole idea of usury. It's like if American Christians or Christians in general, don't believe that they can charge interest, but you have a group over here that's like, yeah, why wouldn't you? You facilitate modern economics, which has given us unbelievable prosperity. So it's a great idea, no matter how angry you get about the rates that they charge or whatever, like it is a modern miracle that somebody figured out debt, that they figured out interest, absolutely incredible. But when you run that system for too long, it tends to Jump into weaknesses and you're ultimately going to get a K shaped economy as we have seen

• 10:45Tom Bilyeu?

  over and over and over, certainly for the last 500 plus years. And so at that moment, when that breaks down and people feel like they're being held down by bankers, if you look up and you go, oh, the bankers are all Jewish, then you confuse a K shaped economy, which as we are learning now can be done by Jew or Gentile alike. And they are conflating two things which are a K shaped economy is devastating and it's killed every empire that's ever been foolish enough to create one. And because Jewish people are so good at identifying like where the positions of power actually are, and they go there and they are tremendously successful, then we go, oh, it must be their fault.

• 11:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And that is from where I'm sitting as somebody who's really come to all of this late. I came up as an entrepreneur, that's my whole background. And so getting into the economics of it all, the politic political nature of it all has been very, I've had to orient and build a new map. So I'm looking at that going, hold on, I can feel this racing now towards antisemitism and people are no longer making contact with the economic arguments. And they're going to something that feels like conspiracy. And that's where it begins to break down. And so while the initial assumption from where I'm sitting is maybe only seven degrees off, you start taking that down the road far enough and it goes from

• 12:11Tom Bilyeu?

  pro-Israel Americans, which is how I'll map the Jewish diaspora here in the US, are exceedingly good at being a lobbying organization and finding the alignment with American citizens. And they're now conflating that with the conspiracy of Jews rule the world. And I worry that that then just goes into this self fulfilling prophecy of Jews are bad, got to get rid of them, and we end up back in a super dark place.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  You know, I think a lot of, a lot of the, almost like the solution to all of this is individualism rather than collectivism. And, you know, even when you talk about like, say, the Jewish diaspora in the United States of America, the fact is that, I mean, I saw one poll that recently where it was like, I think it was a super majority of Jewish people in America were against this war. Jewish people I know for a fact in America were, I believe, The biggest critic, like as a demographic, the most against the Iraq war. Like, they were like 10 points higher against the Iraq war than they, than the general population was.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And so already you say like, hey, look, if you're like, the majority of, now, this might be because a lot of them are are leftists, and I'm not a leftist, but the point is they're not on board with Netanyahu in the Israel lobby's game here. So certainly the idea that like, like Barry Horowitz, the Jewish accountant down the street, has anything to do with any of this is just kind of silly. And that is just like, uh, the baseline of why bigotry always gets it wrong. Like, even if it is true that whatever, like, if black people commit a higher percentage of violent crime than Asian people, that doesn't mean that, like, this guy Earl, some black guy down the street, has anything to do with that. He might be the most peaceful person in his neighborhood.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  I think there's no question that Ashkenazi Jews are like a standard deviation IQ higher than the, the general, than, than, well, I guess it depends on what group you're comparing them to. But as many people have pointed out, right, even just like one standard deviation on the average IQ means that at the far end of geniuses, you're going to produce a lot more geniuses than you otherwise would. So that's an aspect of it, too. Also, it is undeniably true, I think this is, um, less true in my generation, but it was certainly true of my father's generation, that there's a lot of, uh, you know, nepotism, or whatever you might call it. And I, I think some of that is somewhat understandable.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  You know, if you're, if you identify with a group who's kind of been persecuted and beat up on, and particularly post-World War II, I think there was a sense amongst Jews that like, hey, if you can help out another Jew, you do that, because no one else is going to, is going to do that. So that's kind of on you. And then, of course, there were just cultural forces, like Jews focus a lot on intellectualism and family and hard work. And I think all of these things are great and are all part of the reason why Jews get ahead. Now, also to your point, you know, I heard, um, Nicholas Wade, who's, he, he wrote this book, very interesting book that I read like 20 years ago. It was called Before the Dawn, or Beyond the Dawn. Anyway, Nicholas Wade,

• 15:34Speaker 01

  if you don't know, he was the New York Times Science Editor, and he was the editor of Nature for a while, very accredited guy who got totally drummed out of polite society because he told the truth about lockdowns. But anyway, but he wrote this book, and he basically argued, and there was one chapter on it, where he was basically saying for 900 years, only Jews were allowed to lend it interest, and that there's actually like an evolutionary argument that that's a long enough period of time for there to actually like Jews basically evolved to be better at finance. I don't know, this is a little bit above my pay grade, but just saying, a real, a real accredited smart scientist did make that argument, and that, that might be true. Now, I would argue, and maybe we don't have time to get into all of this, but yeah,

• 16:16Speaker 01

  like lending it interest isn't just important, it's the only way to have anything resembling a modern economy. However, once you get into central banking and using the power of the state to shield, to, to, you know, give banks essentially government-like powers, then it becomes a thing that leads to that K-shaped economy that you're talking about, and becomes exploited, you know, exploitative by nature. Now, that being said, all of that is true, and also, it's true that the Israeli intelligence and the Israeli government and the Israel lobby all kind of use a lot of those dynamics. So they use the fact that there were historically

• 16:59Speaker 01

  pogroms against Jews for really messed up, unjustifiable reasons, like, you know, there's a virus going through town, and we blame the Jews for the virus, or something like that. And these are things that did happen to real people. That being said,

• 17:14Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:44Tom Bilyeu?

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• 19:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  If you look at some of those polls where it really is like amazing how much support for Israel has collapsed, it's been since the destruction of Gaza. And so I just do think it becomes a very convenient excuse for a lot of pro-Israel people to say that, "Oh, this is just like all those other programs." Like, "It has nothing to do with the genocide in 4K" that you are forced against your will to fund and watch." Like, that, I mean, that seems to overwhelmingly be the obvious, like, you know, prime driver of what's at least happened over the last couple of years. And then there's also just a lot of other factors, like, this is... I'm not a person who blames the Jews for everything.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And I've always been a guy who's like, "No, what happens is essentially,

• 20:33Speaker 01

  America created a world empire. We created a central bank and an income tax and a regulatory state and a military-industrial complex and this huge mess." And it was right to be taken over by someone. Everyone's always jockeying for position. I mean, when you have a government that spends over $7 trillion every year, it's the biggest organization in the history of the world, of course, everybody's going to be competing over who gets the levers of power there. Now, Israel, honestly, Israel was a creation of Europe. It was a creation of European empires and big bankers and all of that.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  But that doesn't mean there weren't some people who really ideologically believed in it. And so, again, you have all of these things going on at once. And then the other fact is just that, in this game, which Israel did not invent, Israel was only created in 1948, you know? This has been going on for a very long time. But in this game of intelligence agencies and central banks and all types of, you know, the Epstein class, whatever exactly all of that is... You know, I do think that the Mossad had a tremendous advantage that other intelligence agencies would have exploited if they had had that advantage.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  But you had a diaspora of Jews, like not a ton of Jews, but there's some in like all these different places. And the collective self-identity of Jewish people was that like, look, they tried to exterminate us in World War II. That is why we have Israel. Israel is the not but for them, we would be in another Holocaust. This is something that people really genuinely believe. And I think that made it very easy for Mossad. I mean, imagine if anyone else, imagine if British intelligence or American intelligence had an advantage like that. Do you think we, you know, like if there were a bunch of Americans in Iran right now, who it was that easy for the CIA to just call up and go, hey, you want to serve your

• 22:38Speaker 01

  country? You know, you want to help your people? You think we wouldn't be taken advantage of that? And so I think this is, you know, all of this is kind of part of the very complicated story of how we got here. And I'll just say real quickly to your point before, right? Like there are, if you look at like, like someone like John Rawls or Keynes, right? John Maynard Keynes. These were intellectuals who made arguments. I would say both very flawed arguments, but they were intellectuals who made arguments. And then there were real people who really agree with them and read their books and were persuaded by them and believe in this thing. But that's not why they took over politics. You know what I mean?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Like, it's not like, it's not like the government was sitting there and going, you know, we've weighed the arguments of F A Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes, and we are more persuaded by Keynesian economics. It's just that, well, Keynesian economics says the government gets a lot more power. And F A Hayek economics says they get like basically no power. So obviously the government's like, hey, we like this guy. So then there's this thing where there are ideologues, there are people who believe in things, but then they're also used in a way that it's like, like, I don't believe that Lockheed Martin is really committed to greater Israel. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't think that's part of their thinking. It's just like, oh, they like those guys because those guys say we should have a $1.5

• 24:04Speaker 01

  trillion defense budget next year. Or at least they don't call it that anymore, a war budget, which is a better term for it. But anyway, so if that makes sense, I think there's all of these things are happening at once.

• 24:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, all of that makes sense to me. The thing that I'm very specifically zoomed in on is I have, at least for some stretch of my career, I have decided to try and convince people that it is in their best interest to understand all of the pain and suffering that they're going through right now is because of economics and that it feels to me, not feels to me, it is mathematically certain that America is going to drive itself off of a cliff fiscally and that that will have devastating consequences. And as I yell into a mic in a similar fashion to you, trying to get people to pay attention to economics, they keep wanting to talk about the Jews and I'm just like, for fuck's sake, like this is one of those

• 24:57Tom Bilyeu?

  where, again, I'm not denying in any way, shape or form. In fact, I think I can make a very compelling argument for why the Jewish lobby is so grotesquely powerful and has to be paid attention to better than most people who will tell you that the Jews are the problem, which I'll do very fast.

• 25:18Tom Bilyeu?

  When you look at the Jewish lobby, the first of all, it's very important to understand that I mean the Jewish lobby in the way that John Mearsheimer means the Jewish lobby, a far broader thing. It is not just APEC. It is, it is a much bigger thing. And when you look at what makes them so effective, it isn't the money that they spend, it is the influence per dollar and their influence per dollar is unparalleled, maybe in human history, certainly right now, nobody gets the effectiveness. If you want to understand the mechanism by which they get that effectiveness, it is to what you were saying before, you have a Jewish diaspora, that diaspora feels a deep, some percentage feels a deep allegiance to having their own nation. Cool.

• 26:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, they apply a selective pressure, and I mean from an evolutionary lens. They apply a selective pressure on members of Congress and the Senate. It is absolutely brilliant. It has been going on for a very long time, and they will find these people when they're like at the city council level, and they will work with them for decades as they climb the political ladder, investing in them when they're cheap, making sure that the only people that successfully climb the political ladder in America are people that believe in the pro-Israel cause. Okay, that should be terrifying to anybody. It's so brilliant, and people should look at that and go, hey, this is a thing that we should all be looking at. But huh, it's interesting.

• 26:49Tom Bilyeu?

  It starts breaking down in terms of its predictive validity as we get to what, for instance, Trump is going to do next in Iran, or what Obama was going to do next in Iran, which is, to me, Obama and the nuclear deal is like the smoking gun for... America is not a puppet to Israel, and that if the drumbeat that you're banging is that every bad thing that we see playing out right now is because Israel is dragging us into another foreign war, then I'm just like, oh, my God. I'm not able to get people to pay attention, even though I have just, I hope, articulated very clearly how much influence they have. It still breaks down in the face of economics.

• 27:34Tom Bilyeu?

  And when you... economics is physics. Economics is the way that money works collides with human nature and the way that it works, and it produces an outcome. A K-shaped economy, to your point, has very notable causes, and they are Keynesian economics or modern monetary theory. You need a central bank. You need the ability to print money. It works a thousandfold more for whatever country's reserve currency, because they can dilute the inflation across everybody that holds it. And so, the deranging moment that we live in is...

• 28:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Nothing is entirely one thing, but if you want to talk about something that is north of 51%, it would be our banking economic structure is creating this madness. And again, I know I'm repeating myself, but to every time that I go to talk about that thing, it's like this, uh, the Jews are dragging us into another war is the thing that's getting all the attention. And it is stopping people from actually solving the problem. And for my money, if you look at Trump and go, oh, this guy sees, I have to grow my way out of this problem. I'm not going to spend less money. He literally said it out loud to your point. He's like, hey, I know a lot of you guys want to be fiscally conservative, but we have to get reelected.

• 28:51Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I was just like, oh, there is no hope. And so he understands, okay, I've got to deal with China because, and this gets into the complexities of there's more here. But for America to be in a good position as we go into a multipolar world, we've got to diminish China as much as we can. Like the, and I'll be interested to see if you disagree with this. The Jewish lobby to me, no matter how powerful Israel, no matter how powerful, does not explain Venezuela. And when you look at Venezuela, it's like, oh, this is Trump going, hmm, I want to control that oil because that's economically advantageous. It also helps me control China. I like that. And then if you look at Iran and go, yes, I get it. The Israel lobby is desperate for us to go into Iran.

• 29:33Tom Bilyeu?

  But if you're Trump, you've got to make sure that you secure those dollars from the GCC countries to invest in America. Again, as a way to diversify against China, to build things here in America. And so now all of a sudden I'm like, I don't even need to think about the fact that it's, that we have an alignment with Israel for us to be in Iran, especially the lunatic way that he's doing it. Where it's like, uh, you're not going to leave this better for Israel when you leave PS. And so I cannot imagine Israel's like, yeah, this is great. He's going to pull out, leave them completely holding the bag. They're going to have to keep dealing with a now really pissed off Iran.

• 30:16Tom Bilyeu?

  So, but the economic argument of, well, if I can get control of this, I'm in a better position. If I can't get control of it, I'm still in a better position because now the world's going to come to US for oil. So it's like, Again, going back to this analogy of when I think that Israel's controlling the world, I feel like I'm groping on an object with mittens. It's, hey, I can feel the general shape. I get why we're in the region. But when I go, oh, this is economics for a president who has mapped for me to end up on Mount Rushmore. I've got to grow my way out of this insane deficit. I've got to like push China down. And then all of the sudden gloves are off and I can start feeling the intricacies of

• 31:00Tom Bilyeu?

  what's happening. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling.

• 31:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so it's all very interesting and you know, I do think, um, look to your point, because there's a lot there, I'll just start with this, but yeah, look, I do think like, I don't think the Israel lobby opposed the Venezuela strike, but it certainly wasn't the main driving factor of it. And for that matter, you know, the Israel lobby really wasn't the main driving factor in Afghanistan. They didn't really particularly care about the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. And I also don't think that backing the Saudi war in Yemen was largely driven by the Israel lobby. I mean, I've read a lot about it and I know this now. People suspect that that one might have been, but really Israel's issue with the Houthis kind of came after all of that.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  And from everything I've read about it, it was really our relationship with Saudi Arabia was really what pushed the Obama administration to start back in that, you know, Saudi Arabia was upset. Also, I mean, Israel was too, but they were also very upset about the Iran deal. And they were also very upset after toppling Iraq had basically just given Iran the entire region. And so, you know, like, yes, there are other factors that that play into this too. It's also, you know, if your starting point is that Israel is the puppet master and has full control over the US. Then yes, I think something like the Iran deal is going to kind of blow up that position. Cause well, if that's true, how come there was this thing they really didn't want, but they still got it anyway.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  But if your starting point is just like they have way too much influence, then the exception kind of becomes the exception that proves the rule. I mean, you could, I could point to some example of where I did something that my wife really didn't want me to do. But the conclusion from that wouldn't be that she has no influence on me. It would just be that in that one case, I didn't go along with the pressure she was putting on me because we had a disagreement or whatever. Now, to your point, you know, I also think, and this is totally speculating, but I do think, you know, there are the political incentives and that's part of this reality here. And I, I think that, you know, Donald Trump really, and maybe part of this is like a miscalculation on my part.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  But last summer, when Donald Trump hit us with the one, two punch of covering up the Epstein scandal and launching the 12 day war. A lot of people like me were like, well, screw you, we're done with you. Like, not like, these weren't offenses that were like, hey, I really don't like that he did this. But if he does this and this, he could get me back on board. It was like, we're done, screw. You you've betrayed all of us. You're Bush and Obama to us now. And I think in some, I think there were enough people like that, that it kind of changed the political incentive a little bit. It's like, okay, well, I already lost those guys.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  You know, I've already tried, you know, he's, he's, if he ever was trying to drain the swamp at some point. I think at a certain point, you realize that's just not, that's actually not possible from the current position of President of the United States of America. Again, you kind of, in Washington DC, you can't, you can't really swim against the current, but you could swim with the current all you want to. So like, the President of the United States of America has enormous power, more power than any king or monarch or dictator throughout human history had when it comes to offensive military engagements, right? You have the biggest, most powerful army in the history of the world. You can literally drone bomb a wedding in Yemen tomorrow if you want to. Like you, you want to do, and you don't need approval from Congress.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  You know, whatever they'll say about the Constitution or the War Powers Act, in effect, none of it exists. The President can do whatever he wants to, as is demonstrated by Donald Trump. Just this morning announced it's the end of civilization in Iran tonight, evidently. You know, this one man can do that. But he has zero power to roll back the military industrial complex. Try it. Good luck. You'll be compromised, taken out, framed, something. And so at a certain point now, we're in Donald Trump's, you know, sixth year of being President. I think perhaps he kind of concluded that there's no being the greatest President ever going that way. But I could be the greatest President ever going this way. I could go topple all of these regimes and then he's got the warhawks in his ear convincing them that, you know, this will work out great if you go and do it.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  And Venezuela being, I wouldn't say it worked out great, but it wasn't a catastrophe. And that probably really pushed him in this direction as well. But to your broader point that you were making.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  You know, dude, this is always the battle that we're up against is that, you know, racialism is like catnip to the plebs, you know, people love it. It plays on something. And look, I even find myself being guilty about this, right? Because I'll be somebody who completely agrees with all of your assessments there that we should really be focused on economics, that really this is the only reason why there's even a thing to hijack is because we created this, you know, like horrific system of central banking and giant, giant governments and huge, you know, regulatory capture games where essentially the whole economy is cartwalled

• 37:27Speaker 01

  and rigged on behalf of the powerful against the regular, you know, working person. But all throughout, throughout American history, I know, the pivot to the culture war stuff always gets more attention. You know, it was always the, if you look back at the old right, what Murray Rothbard called the old right, which was really sabotaged by the new right. Now, these terms have flipped a little bit because he was talking about Bill Buckley and the neoconservatives being the new right. And he was talking about the old right being guys like Garrett Garet and, you know, Robert Taft and guys like this. But the old right, they were always about sound money, non-interventionist foreign policy, limited government, you know,

• 38:10Speaker 01

  they also had some stuff, immigration controls and stuff like this. And then after World War II, when the military industrial complex was really created and National Review became this huge publication, their whole, they started purging all the members of the old right out. And then their whole line was, no, you know what conservatism is? Now, I know you thought conservatism was like sound money and restrained government, but no, listen, there's these homos, there's these homos out there and they're kissing each other. And they're all, you know, and like, they made it all like this culture war slop. This was like the original. And dude, it caught on like wildfire because who wants to talk about, you know, and look, I'll be, even myself, I've found myself in moments like through the Biden years, through the craziestness of like wokeism, where I'm sitting here and I'm going,

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Guys, we are burying ourselves under a mountain of debt and we're debasing our currency and it's ruining the American dream for the whole next generation. Like, look at it. They've destroyed this whole thing. We're like, now you got these kids who are making 70K a year, but they got 200 grand in student loan debt and the average house goes for $800,000. And they're like, I don't know, the first time home buyer is 40 now in America. Like, that, that means, you know, if you have conservative family values, well, that, like, there's no difference between economics and social issues. It's all one thing. If you can't buy a house till you're 40, then there goes the American dream. There goes starting families, you know, like, it's all... But then, I gotta say,

• 39:35Speaker 01

  even as I'd be making that point, you see a video on libs of TikTok of some tranny giving a lap dance to a seven-year-old, and you're just like, yo, I'm like, ready to shoot someone. Like, this is, I've never been so angered in my life, because you could feel it. It does, it just plays on this tribal thing, like, it's us versus the other tribe who's coming, trying to slaughter our children. And so, again, like, and you've seen this, look, it's through all of woke-ism, look how much racialism just, like, took over and destroyed the left in America. Like, and look, I do think you're seeing a lot of that stuff with the, with the low IQ, anti-Jew kind of nonsense. Like, even, I've seen, even Nick Fuentes,

• 40:18Speaker 01

  I've seen on his show, like, ranting against how dumb some of that, like, open blame the Jews for everything is. So, you know, again, like, all of these things are going on at once. My, my best take on how to deal with that is, you know, I learned everything I know from Ron Paul. It's like, you just tell the truth, you plant your flag here, you go, no, no, no, guys, the problem isn't this group of people or this group of people, it's not any immutable characteristic or anyone's religious view. That, okay, so, all of that being said...

• 40:52Speaker 01

  I'm against all the bigotry of all of this stuff, but I also will say that I think there's something that becomes a little bit messed up when there's, there's so much focus on like the anti, anti Jewish bigotry, which certainly I see in Twitter replies and YouTube comments and stuff like that. But then there's just like, look, I don't know, it pales in comparison. Like, I mean, over the last 15, 20 years, the anti-white bigotry has been orders of magnitude bigger than this and way more institutionalized. Like, you know, and part of this may be, as you said, the power of the Israel lobby. But then there's also like the anti-Muslim bigotry, which is just like outrageous and

• 41:37Speaker 01

  so much more accepted. Like it in, so for example, right? Nick Fuentes, I guess Kanye West had dinner with Donald Trump a few years ago and he brought Nick Fuentes along. This ended up being a huge controversy. Yes. Well, yeah, I mean, we'd all be interested to be at that dinner. Let's get real, whoever you agree with. But this, this was a huge controversy. Trump had to come out and denounce Fuentes. I didn't know who he was. He just ended up here, blah, blah, blah. Laura Lumer has been working with the Trump campaign this whole time. And there's just no type, like now, there might be some people like me who point that out, but there's no type of like the institutional pressure. Like, he doesn't have to come out and go, yo, I'm so sorry that I have this clear anti-Muslim

• 42:20Speaker 01

  bigot working for me. And, and the thing is, she's so much worse than Fuentes. Like, what she says about Muslims is so much worse than what he says about Jews. And it's just, except I've done debates where people have argued to me on more than one occasion, including Laura Lumer, have argued to me that Palestinians don't have rights.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Like they just don't have rights.

• 42:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Or what?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  No, like, there's no innocence. There's no innocence. One of them was an objectivist actor. He argued that because Hamas is the government there and because Hamas rejects the idea of natural rights, therefore, the people there don't have natural rights. And Laura Lumer argued that there's no innocence there because Islam is so perverted, it's such a perverted belief system, that you're already an aggressor just by believing in it. This is like the actual... No, I'm just saying, and I know, maybe you could find some crazy neo-Nazis on Twitter who'd say the same thing about Jewish people, but I've never heard anyone, even the people, and I know some of the guys who are in kind of what would be considered that camp, I've

• 43:26Speaker 01

  never heard any of them say anything like that, like Jews just don't have rights or something like that. So, anyway, I just, I guess, yeah, I don't like any of it. I don't like any of the racialism or the bigotry, any of that stuff. There might be some anti-Jewish bigotry, but also, broadly speaking, Jews are doing okay. We're kind of fine. Whereas, like, the anti-Muslim bigotry is done at a time where Muslims are being slaughtered in huge numbers. And so, I guess, maybe I am a little bit more sensitive to that, even though I'm Jewish. But, yeah, I do, I do agree with you that, like, I think we would all be better off.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  If, man, if people were as interested in talking about sound economics as they were in racialism, we'd live in a better world, I believe. But that's not the world we live in.

• 44:17Tom Bilyeu?

  That is not the world we live in. I will grant you that. The thing that I lament is that I can explain the economy to people, the way that the physics of it work very quickly, but I can't make it any simpler than it actually is. And there's just enough complexity in it that even when you go to explain it simply, there's going to be words that people don't understand, or they've got a ton of baggage around something like inflation that they think they understand, but they probably don't. And so, now you spiral into madness, and this is why people can't ever really get a hold of it. They're just too busy, they've got too much going on, they're being abused by the economics system. So lavishly that they just can't even pick their head up long enough to figure out all the nuance.

• 45:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, the one thing, though, that I I do worry that you and I might be two ships passing in the night on is all of the bigotry that you're talking about, whether it's Jews, Muslims, white people, all of that, one, I agree with you. And at the same time, at least for the drum that I'm trying to bang is a non sequitur. What I worry about is that there there is a, and I I've avoided using this phrase up until now because I don't, I don't mean to be derogatory. But there's like conspiracy brain rot that people fall into. And it becomes this groove that history has shown us, people will slide into that groove and it has really horrific consequences.

• 45:43Tom Bilyeu?

  And that could be Jews. They're certainly not the only people that have been persecuted throughout history. I mean, right now you can make an argument that Christians are being persecuted in the in other parts of the world. And so it's like, yep, all of those things are real. What I'm specifically trying to push against is as I, so I get routinely called by my own community, by the way, as, oh, he's just paid for by AIPAC. And I'm like, what's happening right now? So I'm just like, wait, hold on. Yes, Israel lobby, very effective, and we can talk about mechanisms. That's my whole thing. What's the mechanism? I can walk you through the mechanisms of exactly what they're doing, how they're doing it. I did the speed run earlier, so I won't repeat.

• 46:27Tom Bilyeu?

  But it's like, that's a knowable thing, and I get why people are worried about it. What I'm saying is, don't let it become this greased shoot by which you then interpret everything that's happening through the lens of America is a puppet to Israel. America is a puppet to Israel is the thing I'm pushing back on. That's the part that I'm like, hold on. There are times where we're aligned. There's times where Israel's trying to pull us in a direction. Some leaders may be more like easier to pull in that direction. So even think of somebody like Mike Huckabee, who had me clutching my pearls hard when he was like, wow, God is just cool with Israel taking all of basically the Middle East. And I was like, what? So as a representative of America, Mike Huckabee, you can't say that. Like,

• 47:12Tom Bilyeu?

  if you would like to go privately believe that and talk about it in confession, like, that's your thing. So that was wild. So somebody like him, it's going to be very easy. If he were to get more and more powerful, you can understand how that's going to, them lobbying will meet somebody who already believes it. And now they're really going to run at pace. And so what I'm saying is, I really want people to understand, Mike Huckabee, for his own reasons, almost certainly pertaining to Christianity, he's like primed to believe it. And so getting people to understand that the low resolution is Israel just throws around a bunch of money, blackmail, they got you, America puppets, and we just do it. Mike, okay, that's, that's going

• 47:55Tom Bilyeu?

  to get you to think poorly through this situation. So we've established that stuff. So anyway, I will leave that there. If you want the final word on that topic, I'm specifically just trying to get people to understand America's not a puppet of Israel.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  I certainly agree with you that I think that if you have any of these kind of like black and white, kind of simple narratives, they're going to lead you into mistakes, because the world isn't simple like that. And it's very complex. And even between, you know, it's very interesting, the two interviews on Tucker with Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, you can see, now again, this is just my, you know, my kind of best guess as to how I think about these guys speculating about their own motives. But to me, it seems like Huckabee is a true believer in this craziness, the idea that God gave Iraq to Netanyahu or something like that.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Ted Cruz, I don't think believes that at all. I think Ted Cruz has just decided that like, this is the track in Washington that I'm gonna take and this will help me for the rest of my political career to be like, I am a PAC's guy. I am, you know, and so there's, and then again, they're both not Jews, both Christians. And so again, it's, it's just more complicated than any of that. But I will say that, and to some degree, right? Like, like I was talking about the kind of tribalism being hardwired into our DNA. But there is something where however exactly we got here, we are in a place where you actually do have a US ambassador to Israel,

• 49:35Speaker 01

  whose deeply held view is that God has this relationship with Israel. And therefore, man, that's more important than your own national views of anything. Because if you're saying God believes it, well, there's no one above that in Mike Huckabee's hierarchy of values, right? And so, and you have things like Tammy Bruce saying that Israel's the greatest country in the world, we're number two. Ted Cruz saying he ran for Senator to be the greatest defender of Israel. And anyway, our government, these are just examples I'm pulling out. We could do a whole show on examples like this. Our government is permeated by people who have this type of

• 50:12Speaker 01

  loyalty to a foreign government. And then we've also fought several wars that are not in America's interest. And certainly, those people who have that view about Israel have strong feelings about fighting these wars, and it's not unrelated to how they feel about Israel. And so I would just say that, look, just having that situation is like intolerable to most humans, and understandably so. I mean, if, if there was any type of loyalty to any other government like this that was pervasive in our own government, we would all stand up and go like, hey, look, like, that's great if you are from Sweden, or you, I don't know, are not from Sweden, but have some biblical

• 50:55Speaker 01

  connection to them. But you can't start making US policy based on what's best for the Swedes, because that's just too crazy. And then the The only other thing that I would add in there is to just go like, look, in the same way, the same dynamic is going on with Israel that goes on in all countries that live under governments, which are all of them for the most part, is that this isn't, it's not about what's in Israel's interest, it's about what's in powerful people in Israel's interest. And in the same way, you know, the basic public choice theory, but in the same way that we, the same dynamic we have here, it's not like the DC class makes decisions based on what's best for the American people. And in some cases, powerful people don't even make decisions based off what's best for powerful people. They make decisions based

• 51:39Speaker 01

  off what's best for them. Think about Joe Biden being unwilling to drop out of the race until he was strong armed into it. That wasn't even what was best for like, the progressive democratic establishment. That was just what was best for Joe Biden and his wife and his son and his chief of staff. And so, no, I would completely agree. And I think it's important to emphasize that this whole Greater Israel project that Benjamin Netanyahu has been pursuing for all of these years is still actively pursuing. This is the worst thing in the world for average Israeli Jews. And they've put themselves in a situation where they are more hated and more of a pariah and in more danger than they've ever been in my lifetime. So, you know, this, I don't think this is good for

• 52:23Speaker 01

  the people of any of these countries, least of all the Iranians or the, you know, people of Lebanon or something like that. But it's not good for the Israelis and definitely not good for the Americans either.

• 52:37Tom Bilyeu?

  That's it for part one. Make sure you are subscribed so you do not miss part two coming up soon.

• 52:46Tom Bilyeu?

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