It's Bigger Than Nukes: America’s Hidden Strategy - The Method Behind Trump’s Chaotic Foreign Policies | Eli Lake

What's up, guys? I have a powerhouse episode for you today with Eli Lake—one of the sharpest minds in foreign policy journalism. Eli's a columnist for the Free Press, the host of the Breaking History podcast, and a straight-up expert on everything from intelligence to Middle East geopolitics. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what's really behind America’s relationship with Israel, Iran's nuclear ambitions, or the complex dance of power in the Middle East—this is the conversation you cannot miss. Today, we're diving deep into the realities nobody talks about: conspiracy theories that just won’t die, why alliances in that region are shifting so fast, the truth about proxy wars, and what the future could look like if Iran’s regime falls or continues to escalate. Eli breaks down why the intelligence war matters, how successful military operations reshape global power, and what it will actually take for democratic change to happen in places like Iran. SHOWNOTES 00:00 The "Israel Puppeteering" Myth & Its Origins 01:46 How US and Israeli Intelligence Stack Up 03:36 Technical vs. Human Intelligence—Who Excels and Why 04:01 Israel, Iran, and the Nuclear Umbrella Strategy 05:16 The Proxy War Web: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian Influence 06:31 October 7th, Retaliation & Demolishing Proxy Networks 07:56 Did Iran Really Take the “Next Step” to a Bomb? 09:16 What Actually Counts as “Success” Against Iran? 10:39 Democratic Uprising: Is Regime Change Possible from Within? 12:32 Tech, Starlink, and Empowering the Iranian People 14:20 Regime Humiliation & Authoritarian Vulnerability 16:06 The Tipping Point for Revolution 17:00 Internal Rot in the Iranian Regime FOLLOW ELI LAKE Twitter: @EliLake https://twitter.com/EliLake Podcast: Breaking History https://www.breakinghistorypod.com/ The Free Press Columns: thefp.com/author/eli-lake https://www.thefp.com/author/eli-lake CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. Download their app in the App Store or at Google Play, or text my name “TOM” to 511511. iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at ⁠https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu SleepMe: Visit ⁠https://sleep.me/impact⁠ https://sleep.me/impact to get your Chilipad and save 20% with code IMPACT. Try it risk-free with their 30-night sleep trial and free shipping. Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at ⁠https://shopify.com/impact⁠ https://shopify.com/impact SKIMS: Shop SKIMS Mens at ⁠https://www.skims.com/impact⁠ https://www.skims.com/impact #skimspartner ButcherBox: Ready to level up your meals? Go to ⁠https://butcherbox.com/impact⁠ https://butcherbox.com/impact to get $20 off your first box and FREE bacon for life with the Bilyeu Box! 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.

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• 1:28Tom Bilyeu?

  And joining me today to unpack the likely outcomes of this critical turning point is Free Press columnist and host of the Breaking History podcast, Eli Lake. We discuss whether Trump is an Israeli puppet, whether Iran actually had a nuclear breakthrough, or if there was something more nefarious going on, and what all of this means for America and Trump's America, Inc. Strap in because this is a wild time to be alive.

• 1:54Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you think about the people who seem very convinced that all of the US just dances to Israel's tune, that Trump is working with Netanyahu? Yeah, what, where does that stem from? And do you think there's any truth to it?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  It's a canard, but it goes back, you know, centuries. This is a classic antisemitic trope that Jews are not loyal citizens. This was a huge part of the Dreyfus affair in France that inspired theater rehearsal to come up with Zionism itself. And then in the modern context, since the state of Israel was born in 1948, there has always been this view that Israel is somehow manipulating things. It depending, I mean, if we had another person on here who wanted to make that argument, I could probably go through fact by fact about how they got the argument wrong. But here's just, I mean, we don't even need to do that.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  On Tuesday morning, Trump went out to reporters, and I think he put it on Truth Social. He said, you know, I don't know if a logic occurs, he said Iran and Israel have been fighting, and they don't know what the heft they're doing. And then he demanded that Netanyahu turn, you know, the planes around that were planning a bombing mission over Iran. That doesn't look like a puppet to me. He, he, he looks like Trump's calling the shots. And then as for like this idea that it's the Israelis that are injecting the intelligence and so forth, it is a conspiracy theory. The truth of the matter is, is that if you just look at this objectively, we've seen

• 3:30Speaker 01

  the demonstration that the Israeli Mossad has extraordinary intelligence and penetration of the Iranian regime. We've also seen the demonstration over tragically decades now, that the United States intelligence community, in my view, is too big, gets big questions wrong. As somebody who's covered it very closely, I know of at least twice in the last 20 years that American spy networks in Iran have been rolled up by the Iranian regime. So it asks to lead the question is that on the one hand, did Israel share information with the United States? Of course they did. The United States is Israel's most important ally. Allies share intelligence. That's normal.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  The question I would ask is why would you trust the American assessment on Iran over Israel, which just demonstrated they have this place wired? It strikes me that just using the razor of Akkum that Israel's intelligence probably be better. And then there's a lot of sharing that we don't know about because intelligence world exists, you know, in the shadows for a reason. But I would imagine that a lot of information that Israel's sharing is verified through electronic sources by the Americans. And just to kind of give you a little bit of a background on this, the US is better than anyone in the history of the world in terms of technical collection,

• 4:53Speaker 01

  meaning our ability to Hoover up stuff on the internet or even in the air in terms of wireless

• 5:01Speaker 01

  is unsurpassed. We have the ability to kind of basically probably listen to any, tap anyone's, listen to any conversations we want, read anyone's email that we want.

• 5:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Great.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  It's extraordinary. What we're not as good at, and the Israelis I think are much better at is what's called, you know, human sourcing, getting agents to turn to work for you. It's a nasty business. The Israelis are very good at that. The Soviets used to be excellent at that. The Russians are quite good. The Chinese are quite good. The US I think is less, you know, we do it, but we're not as good.

• 5:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Iran seemed to go from side dish to main dish really fast. Do you think that something just clicked over from their capability to build a nuclear weapon? Or was this, we knocked out the air defense and so it's just opportunistic?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's a couple of things. I think you have to look at the proxy strategy as part of the nuclear strategy, which is to say what the proxies were when they were intact, because Israel decimated them before this strike as part of the October 7th war. But what you'd have to say is that If the Iranians were to get a nuke, it would have provided a kind of nuclear umbrella for these forward positioned militias. So Israel was in a strategically perilous situation, you could argue, on October 7th. Horrific attack from Hamas.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  It's not clear whether the supreme leader of Iran or the late generals of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps knew that this was in the works. There was a meeting in Lebanon with a very senior Revolutionary Guard Corps official. The Israelis put this intelligence out a few months ago, which showed that there was a sort of discussion about it. I think the Iranians wanted to have more of a coordinated attack. Hamas went through with it anyway. But in terms of culpability, Hamas in many ways is sustained through Iran. It's part of this proxy network. So that's one element of how the Iranian nuclear program is related to that. The other is that it's the line of defense in some ways, or at least it was hoped to

• 7:17Speaker 01

  have been the line of defense for Iran if there was this day that eventually came where the Israelis would attack the nuclear program. So the response would be like, are you sure you want to do that? Because Hezbollah had more than 100,000 rockets. Hamas had their own capabilities. So an attack on Iran would bring these attacks again from the proxies. So if you think about October 7th, the Israelis were caught unaware. It's one of the worst days in the history of Israel, the history really of the Jewish people, worst killings of Jews since the Holocaust. And since then, Israel has systematically gone after those proxy networks, including the Houthis.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  The Houthis are still standing, but every single one of them is now pretty much gone. After Israel killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in the fall of 2024.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  The Iranians launched a barrage of ballistic missiles largely successfully defended by Israel. Israel responded by a daring attack that took out Iran's sophisticated air defense systems. So they were left vulnerable in the country. That was the window of opportunity. And then you add to that, and I should say in the fog of war, we don't know. But Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and the Israelis themselves claim that they saw recently

• 8:47Speaker 01

  unprecedented steps to the last piece of the puzzle, which is to put the either the uranium in the actual warhead or finish the warhead design. So that they were getting to that place where the Iranians could have a nuclear weapon whenever they wanted. Again, to me, I think the Casa Speli was established on October 7th even before. So it's not an Iraq war situation where you're going to worry about the intelligence, but

• 9:17Speaker 01

  the the extent of the Iranian program was such, especially and their activities enriching to 60%. There's no peaceful purpose for that. That's not for energy. That tells us that they they had a weapons program and then they were just sort of inching closer and closer to the goal line.

• 9:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, do you think in the fullness of time as we to find out whether they actually did make some big leap forward? Or this was, like you said, just written in stone from the time that October 7th happened? Do you think it's going to matter to public opinion about this attack?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  No, I I actually think that.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I, again, I have, nobody has seen the intelligence except for the Israelis. And I suppose the American partner, you know, Trump and Netanyahu perhaps have seen the intelligence and and their top intel people and military people, but what matters in this case is success. I mean, I think that. We wouldn't have had a huge debate in America 20 years ago about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq if the post, this is a point that Jonah Goldberg made recently, but I think he's right. If, if, if we'd stabilized the country and there wasn't an insurgency and, you know, Saddam Hussein had fallen and Iraq was, you know, largely pacified and rebuilding,

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I don't think it really would have mattered much if you would have found the stocks of weapons of mass destruction with, it's only when the war becomes a slog and sucks the United States into a kind of, you know, nation building stabilization effort that obviously lasted years and years and years, that's when, you know, you're looking for like, okay, well, why did we get into this war? What's going on? I think what we're going to find out and, and we're starting to see, I mean, it's early days, but the Israelis kind of came out with a statement about their damage assessment. I think we're going to find out that the Iranian program has been set back by years. That will be a success. The United States didn't get dragged into a long drawn out

• 11:18Speaker 01

  occupation of Iran. There wasn't the nightmare scenario where the regime precipitously fell, toppled too soon. And then, you know, there's anarchy on the ground and there's nuclear materials and so forth. There will be some negotiations. We'll see how those go, but I think you'll see this as largely a successful war.

• 11:38Tom Bilyeu?

  What's going to be the criteria by which they determine whether this was success or not?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I think the success criteria is that the Iranian program from soup to nuts, from not just the enrichment facilities, which we all talk about, but like the factories where they built the centrifuges, the places where they turned the enriched uranium into the metal they need, you know, to sort of, you know, fuel a bomb or reactors and things like that, all of the different pieces. You look at all of the scientists who've been taken out in the first few hours of the war, that's accumulated kind of intellectual capacity. If it turns out that the Iranians, it's just too daunting a task or they're several years away, I think that will be the success. But then in a way, it's not, not fully a success. I think until there's an organic, I mean, this is sort of separate

• 12:27Speaker 01

  from the war, but I think it's related, which is that this is a regime that, you know, would be best left in the dustbin of history. And the ideal way to transition out of that regime would be for the kind of democratic uprising. That we saw at the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, or for that matter, uh, in 2000 with Slobodan Milosevic, uh, in Serbia after he tried to steal an election. So if we can see an organic democratic transition, then it's gotta be organic, meaning it's gotta come from the Iranian people and it's gotta lead to some sort of democratic outcome. And I think that's very much in the cards. The Iranians have had five national uprisings since 2017. Before that, there was 2009 and the Green Movement.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Every few years, the Iranian people remind us that the majority of them despise their leaders. So in my view, that there is some, there is a strategy, not so much for the Trump administration or for foreign governments, but for people to, it's very similar to what we had in the 1980s, uh, with the solidarity movement in Poland, where lots of people supported the Polish kind of aspirations to govern themselves and not be a satellite of the Soviet Union. I think we have a, we can have an opportunity in Iran. My dream, I'm not saying anybody can listen, is that if all of this sort of misplaced solidarity

• 13:52Speaker 01

  on college campuses in the West or Hamas after October 7th instead was, you know, kind of focused on the Iranian people, um, that would be wonderful. But it's, and, and it's not just, you know, thoughts and prayers. There are things like Elon Musk can do, like Elon Musk, there is Starlink that can defeat internet censorship in Iran, but the software that's necessary, uh, or the actual phones themselves that have Starlink on your phone is not really in Iran. Let's flood Iran with Starlink phones.

• 14:27Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:48Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it. If the devastation is as Trump certainly would have us believe, and these facilities have really been decimated, and they see it up close, do you think this increases the likelihood that there is a democratic uprising?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  I would say that historically, there was a massive bombing campaign in Kosovo before the uprising in Serbia. But this is a humiliation for a regime, and you have to look at it from the perspective of the Iranians. The Iranian regime, the Islamic Revolution, gave us kind of Islamic tyranny. They call themselves an Islamic republic. It's not really a republic. It's a tyrannical system. And the system is very much infused with an almost end times belief in the hand of God, so that God is favoring this regime, and that it has the momentum on its side. This is a demonstration that, I mean, to

• 17:47Speaker 01

  put it in those terms, that maybe God does not love this regime. I think the Iranian people are over and done with it. The Iranian people are, I mean, I've been to Iran once, but I would just say Iranian people, they just want to move on, and I think they would like to live in a kind of normal, modern country and to work it out themselves. There have been examples of kind of constitutionalism in Iranian history, recent history, I should say. They're not destined to live under a dictator. But what it means is for the mid-level people in the regime, the apparats, the, you know, maybe the below-brigadier general in the Basij, which is their kind of internal militia force or their anti-riot police,

• 18:28Speaker 01

  people like that, who on the one hand have to know that they're despised by most of their neighbors, and now you have evidence that like the grand plan isn't working. And by the way, that has been the message, really, I would say, since the daring operations in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the killing of Nasrallah and the top Hezbollah leadership. There has been a kind of just momentum on the Israeli side. And at a certain point, there's been no real response. And like, you know, I think the most telling thing that we saw in Trump's statements and tweets or through social posts was when he said...

• 19:10Speaker 01

  I want to thank Iran for informing us before their attack on Qatar. I mean, that exposes that this was just theatrical. It wasn't a serious attack. So the regime will try to sort of say, oh, we survived, we won. That's their narrative. I have to think that nobody, even in the inner circle, is going to believe that. And then you've got a very old supreme leader, he's eighty six years old, Ayatollah al-Fahman. He is now trying to get his son to be sort of to be the next supreme leader because, you know, he may not have many years left, many months left, who knows?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  I don't think that's going to go down very well. So there could be a real fight over succession. And that divides the elites and the leadership. There you have the sort of opportunity, but the key thing to watch here is, and this is true, by the way, not just in Iran, it's true in every single example of successful people powered revolutions, which is will the, you know, will the police officer, will the, will the national, you know, will the army guy follow the order to shoot at the peaceful demonstrators? And that is something that nobody, I can't know from the outside, you can't know. But I would say that this humiliation of the regime maybe gets us closer to that.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  It's almost like you have to assume, you got to put yourself in the mindset of somebody saying, do I really want to be the one who's going to have the blood on my hands yet again? Do I want to follow this out? Are those incentives worth it to me? And there's a strategy, obviously, for the insurgents, the Democrats in this particular situation. They have to create a space where they're welcoming of the defectors, if you will, from the regime. But I have reason to believe that there are Iranians who understand that. But we also have to understand the regime has been utterly brutal when it comes to suppressing these sporadic but increasingly frequent kind of democratic uprisings and just, you know,

• 21:14Speaker 01

  evidence of disgust and and and with with how they're being governed. It's corrupt. They're isolated. They're endangered. There there's a drinking water crisis in Iran right now. There have been bank collapses. And meanwhile, you know, it's it's a powerful message. You look at the luxury apartments that were where the Iranian generals were were sleeping, that the Israelis got in that first. The Israelis made sure to put out the video of that. Most Iranians don't live that well. So th- th- these are things and we'll have to see. Again, it cannot be, you know, the CIA or the Mossad, you know, pulling the strings. You can't have a guy on a white horse coming in like the son of the Leshaw, Reza Pahlavi,

• 21:58Speaker 01

  although I think he means well and there might be a role for him, or Mariam Rajavi, who lives in Paris. It has to come from the Iranian people. But I do think that there's an opportunity and I think that there's something that the West and the and the people who care about this can do. That's, to me, that would be the the full victory.

• 22:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Speaking of the West, what do you think of the division that's growing in the right? So you've got some people that just feel absolutely betrayed by Trump getting us involved in what they see as another war. They seem absolutely unconvinced that Iran was about to have a nuclear weapon. You've got Tulsi Gabbard saying, sort of cryptically, but they don't have nuclear capabilities. They have not authorized the bomb. Like, what are we doing?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  I actually think that there it will be insignificant.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  You know, first of all, the intervention in Iran, which was, I mean, think about it. It was one bombing mission demonstrating new weaponry.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Like what, it lasted 45 minutes and then they were on their way home? The second thing is that we didn't get sucked into World War III, a regional war, or a regime change, nation building war. I don't think any of that was a possibility with Trump as the president. And frankly, I don't think even if you had, you know, President, you know, John McCain, Wolfowitz, neocon, it would have been a possibility because America is a different place in 2025 than it was in 2003. There's an interesting discussion as to why in 2003, we thought that we could do anything in the world and build nations in the Middle East. I was around back then. I was a kind of a junior State Department correspondent for UPI and I later worked for the New York Sun, but, you know, I believed it.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  I copped to that, but we don't think that anymore because, in part because of the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq. So, anyway, what we have is a situation where, I think it was a short, successful war. President Trump is the leader of the movement and things are going to move on. And the problem for the Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson crowd is they predicted that this would lead to utter catastrophe and they oversold the negative consequences of this. And I think in that sense, they may lose some credibility because their predictions didn't come true.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  But I also think that it will be fairly easy to simply say that we didn't, we were against Iraq and Afghanistan style wars, but these kind of wars are okay, or these kind of wars are different. And so I don't expect there to be a kind of permanent split. It may be impossible at this point in terms of the administration for Tulsi Gabbard to stay in the administration because the president has said now openly, I think twice, that he doesn't. Care what his Director of National Intelligence thinks. And by the way, if that is the case, he shouldn't be the National Intelligence Director of National Intelligence. But, you know, it's an unconventional administration, so we'll see what happens. But I just don't,

• 25:08Speaker 01

  I just don't see this as being a major split. I think that there was a big split before, and Trump did what he said he was gonna do. But he's been saying it for 10 years. Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.

• 25:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, though, that that's the drum that he beats. And so I I'm not sure that this is gonna blow over as readily as maybe you do, because if Trump was saying they can't have a nuclear weapon, and then if the debate becomes, but show me the evidence that they were that something happened that upgraded the threat to like an imminent threat. And I have a feeling they're gonna have a hard time doing that. I think the real answer is this was opportunistic, that Israel had taken out their air cover, that we could finally go in and do it, that we could force them back to the table. I think, I think, the way that this is gonna play out in the near future is Trump is gonna be looked at as somebody who said, we have an opportunity. I told them they had 60 days. They didn't come to

• 26:05Tom Bilyeu?

  the table. Now people know that I'm for real. And when I look at the world through a Realpolitik lens, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. That honestly, from a Realpolitik standpoint, is probably what he should do, so that people know that he's not playing around. But the words we were told was that this was a suddenly something had happened. We have intelligence. This is now an imminent threat. And I have a feeling that's gonna remain thin.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  I hear you. But I just think that these things, I think you're, we'll see. But I just think it's not gonna be like a gotcha. I think that, you know, nothing succeeds like success is a kind of is a cliche. But this was pretty successful military operation.

• 26:44Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you think the odds are that Iran actually? Doesn't fire either directly or through a proxy because I think they've already kicked the IAEA out and said, no, we're still going to do this.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I expect there will be some sort of negotiations. Iranians are over a barrel, though. I mean, at any point, Trump can say, okay, boys, tell the Israelis to go back in. Israelis have an air corridor. It's remarkable to me. I mean, let me should just take a moment to kind of marvel at this fact. The new leader of Syria is a former member of al Qaeda in Iraq and was an absolute, at one point in his, you know, interesting journey, was a dedicated anti-American religious fanatic jihadist.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  And he was asked, do you have any problems with the Israelis using Syrian airspace? And he said, nope, fine with me. Now, there's a reason for that. And it's because he was drawn into the Syrian civil war of the 2010s. And the drivers of the worst cruelty, the worst war crimes in Syria in that time was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and their proxy militia Hezbollah. The Sunni jihadists, on the other hand, while Israel certainly didn't, you know, had, I mean, obviously, there are theological major distinctions there, but the Israelis built a field hospital over the Syrian border that was open to the partisans who were fighting

• 28:19Speaker 01

  in that civil war as a kind of humanitarian gesture.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  That what's interesting to me is that this guy who, you know, has the background that he does, he is not interested in a fight with Israel. He has far, he is far more interested in defanging.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Iran, and that goes, by the way, if you look at the statements from Saudi Arabia, from the Gulf states, they initially criticized it, they're covering their bets. These are cautious monarchies, but then war is over, they're all, it's nothing but praise for Israel. That's a sea change in the region, and I think it will be very good for the Trump, the first term Trump foreign policy success known as the Abraham Accords, which saw normalization of relationships between Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, I might be leaving a few out, but there's a chance you could get the big dog, Saudi Arabia, to finally recognize

• 29:25Speaker 01

  what they had been, have for nearly 80 years called a Zionist entity. That's enormous, Tom. So in that respect, I just think that Iran is in an impossible position. The other thing to notice, by the way, Israel attacks Iran. Where was Russia? Iran provides Russia with the drones that are, you know, aimed at apartment buildings and hospitals and other civilian targets in Ukraine. Where was the Chinese? Where was the remnants of its proxies like Hezbollah?

• 29:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that Russia is just too bogged down in what they're doing?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, part of it is that the Russians were bogged down, but part of it is that the kind of axis of China, North Korea, Russia, Iran is not an alliance based on shared values. It's not, it's not an alliance based on shared history. It's a little bit like the five families. You know, I mean, when, when the FBI is about to crack down on the mafia, the five families will occasionally work together, they try to work together, but then, you know, every few years, there's a, there's a gang war. And so they don't, the Iranians learned also, they don't have any real friends. The Iranians tried to get, you know, the UN Security Council to, to, to, to jump into action.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  You know, the Chancellor of Germany, who has been so critical of Israel and the Gaza War. Came out with a statement saying that Israel's doing the world's dirty work. So what's interesting here is that the Iranians are totally alone and no air defenses. They have no ability to stop the Israelis. The Israelis obviously have a kind of unprecedented world historic level of intelligence penetration of the Iranian regime. It's crazy. It's crazy how many of their leaders, their military leaders are about to take out.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  So this is an interesting moment because it's not to say that, you know, you're not, they're not going to be on a boat in the Pacific and you dictate the terms of surrender. But it's the negotiations now are something like that. It's not the position that Iran was in when they were negotiating the nuclear deal with, you know, what was known as the P5 plus one that was part of Obama's big legacy. It's not the position they were even in, you know, two weeks ago when they were, you know, meeting with Steve Witkoff. It's a very different world for them right now. So they're going to have to accept the terms because at any given moment, Trump can say, all right, well, if you're, if you're not going to play ball, then I'll unleash, you

• 32:09Speaker 01

  know, I'll unleash the, the big dog.

• 32:12Tom Bilyeu?

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• 32:50Tom Bilyeu?

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• 33:20Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it. As the American public, I start asking myself, okay, wait, why are we going so hard at Iran? So you stop them from having nuclear weapons if like if I'm to believe that everything has been demolished, there's going to be years and years and years. At some point, this just starts to feel like you're saying, I told you to come to the table. You're not coming to the table and I'm bigger than you. And so I'm going to keep smashing you until you come to the table. And I do think at some point, even if, I mean, look at the way that public opinion is turned on Israel. At some point, if you just keep smashing them, people go, wait, why are we doing this? Even if we don't have boots on the ground.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Well, okay, that's a fair point, but I would argue that there are a couple of things that are really good about it. The first thing is, is that if Iran did go nuclear or it went to the precipice of nuclear, which is basically the same thing, then there will be a proliferation cascade effect. Saudi, Egypt, Turkey, most analysts believe would go nuclear as well. So then you have five, counting Israel, which is an undeclared program. Nuclear powers in the most volatile region on Earth. And that increases exponentially the chance of a nuclear change, which we've managed to avoid since 1945, almost miraculously.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Second of all, contrary to some of the sloppier commentary that I've read on the anti-war side, Iran has lots of American blood on its hands and it doesn't go bad. It's not ancient history. It's not just the Marine barracks bombing in 1983, not just Coburn Towers in the 1990s. It's the Iraq War, then the Afghanistan War. They were providing insurgents with the roadside bombs known as IEDs that were maiming and killing lots of our soldiers. It's the fact that they, I mean, this is not a, you know, intel fakery as.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Tucker Carlson recently has implied the Justice Department under Joe Biden, the same Justice Department that wanted to arrest Trump and indict Trump, has two men in custody that they have formally charged in an unsealed indictment with trying to murder Donald Trump on behalf of the Iranians. So that they have taken to a kind of strategy of supporting assassinations in our country. Masih Alaniyad, the great Iranian women's rights activist who now lives in America, was also on that hit list, as was the former National Security Advisor, John Bolton,

• 36:02Speaker 01

  former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, even lower level officials like one of Pompeo's advisers, Brian Hook. Also on this list, you can all check them. These are, again, this is not sources say. These were statements from the Biden administration. So this is a rogue state in every sense of the term. It's the leading state sponsor of terrorism.

• 36:30Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm going to lay out what I'll call my own internal conspiracy theory, and you check me and tell me where I become. So the way that I see this, I think that if everything moves forward swimmingly right now, and Iran just engages and says, look, we don't want to get bombed again. Let's just placate, get Trump out of office. Let's buy ourselves, you know, three and a half years. Great, everything will go swimmingly. If, however, they keep down the road of pushing back, trying to exit out, kicking IAEA out, and making all kinds of saber rattling noises about, you know, we're going to continue with our nuclear program. Then I think Trump would have, he would have to really get the American public on board.

• 37:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And I don't think he's going to be able to do that without something happening either to our servicemen. So if they bombed one of our bases, that would give him the cover that he needs. If there really is a sleeper cell here in America and they trigger off, or if there's a false flag, which I don't want to get too conspiratorial. But you know, those are sort of the options, I think, where you could get the American people back on board with this. And my thinking is the reason that Trump is so hell bent for this is that. So I've gone to the Middle East and I've been to Saudi, I've been to Kuwait, I've been to the UAE. And man, as an entrepreneur, when you land there, you're just like, they are doing something right. You're walking through the airport, it feels like it's a seven star luxury hotel. It's bananas. You can just feel the money everywhere. They're making huge investments into architecture, infrastructure.

• 37:59Tom Bilyeu?

  It just, it feels like a country that has a sense of where it's headed. I think America's lost a lot of its own self sense of pride. And so we're pulling ourselves apart. They have a sense of what they have to accomplish. They know they have to get out from a reliance on oil. Trump sees an opportunity. These guys clearly have the capital. He's looking at it like, almost like a VC where it's like, well, I'm America Inc. I want you to come invest a bunch of that money in America Inc. But I've got to get all of you guys to chill out and stop blowing each other up. Seems like our biggest problem here is Iran. Let's chill them out so that we can then get the Abraham Accords to spread across the region.

• 38:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And so he's got a reason to hammer Iran into submission. But it's not the reason that he puts forward. And so I think he's going to find himself stuck in this position of like, man, for the love of God, will you guys just calm down so that we can get economic prosperity sweeping across the nation? Which is why I think he's so silent to supportive of what, I have a feeling you're not going to like this, but ethnic cleansing of Gaza, where it's just literally carpet bombing. And if I'm like, okay, I've got to get that leveled out so that there's calm there. So that Israel, who's clearly an economic powerhouse, they can do their thing, get Iran to calm down so that we can get Abraham Accords all across the Middle East.

• 39:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And now this area that has like, I'll call it a 20 year clock, to modernize and get off of reliance on oil and into a modern, probably financial based economy. I don't know if you know who Ray Dalio is, but I met him in the UAE. And he was like, basically Abu Dhabi is the future of investments. And it's just like, all the pieces start coming into place. And I'm like, huh, with a realist lens on, again, this just feels like, oh, I get why you've got to make Iran, the Iran problem and the Hamas problem go away. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. How crazy did all of that sound?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Well, you know, Tom, some of that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you and I disagree on ethnic cleansing, but I'll just concede upfront on Gaza that I'm sure that there were mistakes and decisions that Israel made that led to more civilians being killed, although I do think that they were in an impossible situation, given the way that Hamas fights. And we should maybe bracket that for later in the conversation or maybe another episode. But let's just talk about the big part of what you said, which is, all right, we've got these economic titans in the Gulf. They're trying to get off the oil and we want them to invest in America. That doesn't strike me as a conspiracy theory.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  That strikes me as smart American policy. That is, if we can get billions of dollars invested into the American economy, which Lord knows we need, and we can start modernizing our infrastructure, maybe because of that investment or whatever it is, and everybody can make money, that's, seems like it's pretty good for Americans. Second of all, I do think that you have to look at, the Iran threat is not just a threat to the region, it's a threat to America. And I think Iran with a nuclear weapon would have been just a security nightmare. And for the reasons that we talked about earlier, so that was a good thing. And then finally, third, I don't know if America needs to go back.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a very specific ask, which is the underground fortresses of Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan required.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  A weapon that only America had, which was 33,000 tons or whatever it was, that could penetrate deep into the earth to get to these underground fortresses.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  We will have to see whether this was successful. Lots of analysts are saying that, but the early, I think, based on what the Israelis said today, they were successful. And so the rest of this is like, I just look at Israel's capabilities. So will Americans care if Israel has to go back and take out more targets in Iran? And it's not US GIs? The Iranians, again, they attacked the LLD airbase in Qatar, but they told us ahead of time, they didn't hit anything. You know what I mean? It was purely symbolic. So the Iranians, to a certain extent, understood they didn't want to tempt the tiger.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And I'm just saying that right now, the reality is very different for Iran. They don't have a lot of options. So they're focused right now on regime survival. The sad news is, kind of getting back to our first part of the conversation, they've arrested something like 700 people.

• 43:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  They've already killed 24.

• 43:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  People internally, right? So they're trying their best to prevent that democratic transition. And I think that's extremely important. But I also don't think that that's really for Trump to decide. That's again, Iranian people are in the lead. I think that we can be.

• 43:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Trump doesn't seem interested in meddling, to be honest.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  No, he's not interested. That's, but that's kind of maybe a good thing. Because what you don't want is to discredit. I mean, the Iranian people have to be the authors of their own story. You know what I mean? They, I want the Iranian people to take their country back. But I realize it's for the Iranian people to lead. So we have to support them. So I, I see your point, but like, you know, he's trying to take care of this threat to stability in the region. And the hope is, is that these prosperous and wealthy countries might invest in the United States. I don't think that that's something that he would.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Try to cover up. I think it would be something that, I mean, if he could run again, I mean, this is a separate question. I don't think he can, but he sometimes.

• 44:14Tom Bilyeu?

  There's no way. Without a constitutional amendment and without somebody duct taping my mouth shut, there's no way.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  I think that that's what what you just laid out is something that would be politically popular, not just with MAGA fans. I think it would be politically popular with Americans. I think Americans would look at it and saying, okay, you you defanged an enemy of the United States. You've set back their nuclear ambitions for a while. We'll see. We'll see if it really is only a few months and we start to see them doing it again, then that'll be reassessed. But again, I think it's going to be the program was really significantly damaged. And you've now opened up space where you've you've made peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel and now the Saudis and the Emiratis and others are going to invest in the United

• 45:06Speaker 01

  States. It strikes me as just like, you know, so much waning, we're going to get sick and tired of the winning. You know what I mean? All that seems pretty good to me. So, you know, I think that the downside would be if we found out that they had more secret sites that even the Israelis didn't know about. The Iranians become defiant, perhaps Khamenei keels over or he's pushed aside and then the new supreme leader or the new people in charge are even crazier and they can't be deterred.

• 45:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Talk to me a little bit about that crazy because the when I the more I look at the Middle East and admittedly, you know, whatever, a couple of years ago, this wasn't even really on my radar. But the more that I look at the Middle East, the more what I see is and take MBS, who's for my money, sort of the most extreme in terms of how rapidly he's trying to pull Saudi Arabia into the 21st century.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Dom, I am so glad that you said that. You're coming from an entrepreneurial background, right?

• 46:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  You've you've been to Saudi.

• 46:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  So you've seen, I mean, I've covered the Middle East for a long time.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  The Saudi Arabia after nine eleven was a Janus-faced ally. What I mean by that is that we had military assets there. We had an alliance with them going back to FDR in nineteen thirties. But they also exported the most poisonous and extreme jihadist Islamic ideology abroad, including, by the way, in in America even. So what MBS has done is something that started before him. But what he's done as the crown prince is he's really turned Saudi Arabia around. Saudi Arabia now is no longer in the jihad exporting business.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  It's in the counter jihad business. Ditto for the United Arab Emirates. The only country, by the way, that's still Janus-faced in that regard is Qatar, and that's another story. But all of the other Gulf kingdoms, all these other Gulf states have turned it around on this. That was our number one issue besides Pakistan, which is a separate problem after nine eleven. These countries are finally doing it for themselves and they're reaping the reward with this economic boom. So I'm so glad that you mentioned that because, as you probably remember, it wasn't so long ago that there's a there's a dark side of MBS, which is he had a contributor to the Washington Post

• 47:49Speaker 01

  murdered in Ankara, I bore Istanbul in Turkey. And that was exposed by the Turks. And the Democratic Party in particular, Trump was the president then, wanted to basically cut off relations with Saudi Arabia. I am so grateful they didn't succeed, even though what I think he did to Jamal Khashoggi was a heinous crime. Heinous. So it's I guess what I'm saying is what I appreciated about your comment there, because I know you knew about that, is it shows that geopolitics is not a morality tale. It's not an allegory. It's not a heroic journey.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  There are usually just choices between bad and worse. And sometimes you have to you have to live with this guy did some very bad things to his domestic political opponents.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  But he is finally doing what we have pleaded with the Saudis for generations to do, which is to get out of this kind of jihad export business.

• 48:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, this is where I get fascinated with the other side of what you do with the Breaking History podcast. As a student of history, but sort of a latecomer to history. Man, you look back in history at our own nation and you just see a never ending string of tragedy and horrors. So it's like, to some extent, it's like, what's your goal? Where are you trying to get to? I definitely look at this all through a very realist lens. I think Trump does as well, and I think he's misunderstood because people are grappling, trying to find like ideology. And what you're going to see, I think, if you map Trump as somebody who looks at everything as a business deal to be done, trying to bring prosperity back to America in no uncertain terms, in ways that help him

• 49:44Tom Bilyeu?

  and in ways that help him that make me deeply uncomfortable. But nonetheless, again, not saying I agree with anything, just looking at, okay, how's this playing out? What's the North Star going to these countries? Making sure that you're participating in the wealth party like that suddenly you can make sense of the way that he moves. So looking at the Middle East as that, as this future hub of certainly investment. I think wherever you find the hub of investment, you're going to find the hub of innovation. And I can feel the energy, the psychological, cultural energy draining out of America and rushing into the Middle East. Surprisingly enough, nobody was more surprised than me. I'm very interested to see what happens to China.

• 50:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That's like my personal focus. And when I see all of that, I'm like, yeah, we have to do something to ensure that America does not slide down the totem pole, which from where I'm sitting, we are very much in risk of doing.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  But in a sense, just a counter, I mean, I, first of all, I share your concern. I think we have deep institutional problems. I think we have a politics that doesn't work. I think we have a real crisis in our universities where there's a kind of bourgeois radicalism that, you know, kind of has, has really crippled in many ways the humanities, at least in our universities.

• 51:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Are you paying attention to the New York mayoral race?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Oh, God, don't get me started.

• 51:18Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm trying to get you started.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I mean, that's a real challenge. I think that all of his ideas are, well, they've been tried and they've failed. As a Jew and a Zionist, I don't like, you know, his, his spin on global intifada and things like that. But leaving that aside, I mean, the idea that you're going to have a mayor, first of all, the mayor doesn't have the ability to do a rent freeze that he's promising. So, good luck with that. But we know, every economic, you know, every economist looks at rent freezes and says, all you're doing is you're shrinking availability of apartments. You know what I mean? Like, all you're doing is you're shrinking the supply and there's obviously great demand in New York.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  You want city-run, state-run grocery stores? I mean, I don't want that. I don't think Americans really want that. So that, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm super, you know, I, yes, that's, that, that's a problem. So I see your, I share your concern. On the other hand, I don't know, America's a really big country. I've been to Austin, Texas, and I see a lot of innovation. You know, in some ways, I think Austin might be the kind of beneficiary of people fleeing the Bay Area and Silicon Valley because of the crazy things that are happening in, in, in California and the dysfunction of their state government. And, you know, but I do think in a, in a way, these things are interconnected.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  America, like, to have a 12-day war that so far looks like a big win for America and Israel. To demonstrate that we can kind of do and Israel can do what, you know, might seem like science fiction. That is a boost to our prestige. It's a boost to our value.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And I would just say this, because it's something I disagreed with Trump in his Middle East and what in his speeches in Saudi. Yes, it's a great thing to look at Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Riyadh and to marvel at how these cities, you're right, that the airports feel like seven star hotels. That's a great line. And they deserve some credit. But one of the reasons why they were able to have the space to invest in their economies that way and to turn their countries around is because they didn't have to deal with the prospect because America, you know, fought ISIS. America took out the instability and the drivers of instability, more importantly, I would say,

• 53:47Speaker 01

  you know, had no, had America not used its air force to destroy the ISIS caliphate in the mid 2010s, which started by Obama, but really finished by Trump. What would you, do you think that there would be this economic miracle we're seeing in the Gulf? I don't. I think you would have seen a spread of this extremist kind of terrorism and,

• 54:10Speaker 01

  you know, and I think that dealing with Iran

• 54:15Speaker 01

  and the threat that Iran posed, particularly on the nuclear side,

• 54:21Speaker 01

  opens up more space because Iran was an enemy of the Gulf countries at the end of the day as well.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  So those things are kind of locked together. But I also want to just emphasize and agree with you that we need to turn our own country around so we can have some of that innovation and get that spirit back. I'm at the end of the day, an optimist about America. I think we've had, I mean, you talk about history. We had a really rough run from the late 60s to like the early 80s. We had a tough 15 years.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  But we managed to sort of get out of that. And then we had, you know, all of the benefits of the internet and the personal computer and all the things that sort of we take for granted today.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  So I, again, I'm a, I remain an optimist to met America in that regard, but I also am a realistic optimistic and then I'm, and I'm appreciative that you, you know, you sort of see it and you're not just satisfied with mediocrity. You're not just satisfied with inefficiency, not just satisfied with like stagnation. That's very important.

• 55:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, definitely not that. Um, now going back to the, I see an idea playing out in the Middle East that I would love to get your color on. And the idea goes like this, you have different factions of Muslims themselves that are trying to modernize. And just as Christianity has changed over time, the Muslim religion feels like it's going in two different directions. You've got people that are recognizing the future is going to be economic, it's going to be financial investments. They've got to be a place that the whole world feels comfortable making investments and coming in and they're going to feel safe. And then you have what I'll call more fundamentalist, more extremist for sure.

• 56:12Tom Bilyeu?

  And they're not focused on life in the here and now, they're focused on martyrdom and the life hereafter. And my, when I first started looking at what was going on in Gaza, I just kept saying, look, I don't understand what's going on well enough, but I will just tell you this. If you have a population that does not care about their kids' lives being economically better than their life in the here and now, and their kids' kids' lives being even better than theirs.

• 56:39Tom Bilyeu?

  You will have this problem. If people feel like the fast track to a good life, when you're living in squalor is like you can, you know, get on the, the fast pass. By going in suicide bombing or getting yourself killed, um, you're gonna have a problem. And so somehow, some way it feels like there's a, uh, like this is going to sound so stupid and forgive me, but you need a version of the Pope. Who is going to help people navigate. An update of the religion where they have religious credibility, but they're saying, I mean, essentially like God is saying this.

• 57:20Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I don't know how we get to that, but it feels like you're going to have a hard time stamping out through violence, not that it's impossible, but you're going to have a hard time stamping out through violence, the notion of jihad. You're, I think, going to need some sort of leading a way through religious scholarship to help people into a modern perspective.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  That's a very shrewd point. I know a little bit about this. Again, I'm Jewish, but I'm a journalist and I've covered the Middle East for a while. Shia religion has something like that. You have grand ayatollahs in Shiism. And the sort of seat of this Shia religion is in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq. And in fact, the grand ayatollah of Iran, the supreme leader, is not as high ranking a religious authority as the leaders of the grand ayatollahs in Najaf and Karbala. So in Shia, which is a minority of the Muslim faith, you sort of have something like maybe

• 58:30Speaker 01

  a kind of pope-like system, but it's certainly not the same. In Sunni Islam, you don't have anything quite like that. And if, and you do have the ability of like, you know, anyone can kind of say, if you're an Imam, this is what I see as the way. Now, what you're talking about with the ideology behind Hamas, it's sometimes known as political Islam. It comes, the modern version of it comes out of Egypt and particularly a figure named Hassan Al-Bana. And that was this view that the reason why these Arab Middle Eastern Muslim states have fallen behind, and this starts at the beginning of the 20th century. So you had a rough, you know, most of the Arab world was, were colonies then, either

• 59:15Speaker 01

  part of the Ottoman Empire or later the British or the French, you know, depending on what part of the Middle East you were talking about. But the reason why, you know, we were once, you know, a world conquering empire under Muhammad, where Islam spread as far as Afghanistan, you know, to the east and to Spain and even parts of France to the west, is because we have forsaken, we're no longer, you know, organizing our societies politically based on Islamic law. So that's why it's called political Islam. So this has been a powerful idea. And it's a powerful idea that is built,

• 59:58Speaker 01

  that's sort of based in this notion of like, looking around and saying, why did we, kind of getting back to our earlier conversation, why did we stagnate? Why did we fall behind? While the rest of the world sort of surpassed us? And this was the answer. Well, you might look at the operations against Iran, because Iran is, you know, modern Iran, the Shah falls in 1979 in Islamic revolution. And they are implementing the Shia version of this Muslim Brotherhood or political Islam. We saw the caliphate for ISIS try this for a period of time. Sudan was run by a figure named Tarabi, who also sort of talked about these things.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  For the most part, all of these movements have failed. Al Qaeda has failed. ISIS has failed. And Iran is now failing. And eventually, perhaps, the way to get to what you're talking about, is for a new set of thinkers to say, for 120 years, we've tried political Islam, and it's brought nothing but war and misery. So let's try something else. So eventually, you know, ideas matter. And this, and, and, and you, you know, there's a kind of cliche, you can't kill an idea with bullets and bombs. Well, you kind of can, you know, I mean,

• 1:01:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Agreed.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  You know what I'm saying? I mean, like, there are people in America today who call themselves neo-Nazis. But let's be honest, National Socialism

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Was defeated in a war. There is still an emperor in Japan, but people do not worship the emperor in Japan the way they did. You know, before the end of World War Two.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  So. You know, only time will tell, but this is such humiliating defeat for the really the leading Islamist or political Islamic power on the planet. That was interested in, you know, creating these little statelets, whether it's the Houthis Hezbollah Hamas, what do they have all in common? Some are Shia, some are Sunni, but they all kind of are political Islamist. And. Hey, how's it, how's it, how's it working out for you? I mean, the leadership of Hamas, gone. Hassan Nasrallah, the leadership of Hezbollah, gone. The Houthis at the very beginning of the war suffered a pretty significant blow. Gone.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Not, not all of them, but I'm saying the point is, is that it is been a, is they have been losing. And at a certain point, that will have to create the space. For some new ideas to come through, and I don't know what that's going to look like. You hit the nail on the head in that it is a religious issue and you need to have these religious leaders. And they're out there. That's the other thing that there are, there are different shades of Islamist theologians and people. You know, in revered institutions like Allah's Zar Masq and universities in Cairo. I spent some, a lot of time, I lived in Cairo for a year and a half. That have a very different view of things. But now you're sort of seeing that.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  You know, we're seeing in real time that these, these ideas don't work. And so the hope is that. You demoralize the fanatics and that you create the space for someone to say, wait a second, there is another way, which gets back to the other point you were making, which is that. MBS is a Muslim. He's a religious man. I don't think you could question his piety in some ways.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  In his personal life per se, but he's not a jihadist. And look at Saudi Arabia. You've been there. It's turned around. Look at Abu Dhabi. Look at Dubai.

• 1:03:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  And some ways, those are the sort of examples that you hold up and you'd say, there is another way. And that's, and that's how you, you sort of deal with the, the ideological, intellectual poisoning, I think that is represented by this ideology.

• 1:03:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Did you look at all into Epstein?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm very intrigued by Epstein.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  I must say that I didn't believe the story that he killed himself in the jail. But I'm intrigued by the fact.

• 1:04:11Tom Bilyeu?

  That makes two of us.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm intrigued by the fact that, that Dan Bongino, who I know devote a lot of time when he was a radio host to this issue. He's the deputy director of the FBI and he said, Hey, I've looked at it. Cash Patel said he looked at it. I mean, I don't see why Cash Patel or Dan Bongino would cover it up. Maybe we'll find out that they did cover it up. I just don't see that they would cover it up. I think, by the way, on the, on the Epstein stuff,

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  because I think I know where you might be going with that. Is it true that intelligence services, not just Israel, but let's, let's be real, intelligence services, this is in the world intelligence, engage in what they call honey traps, which is to have information,

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  that compromising information on individuals to use against you in order to blackmail somebody to do their bidding. That is a sad fact of life. That's something that happens. Lots of intelligence services do that kind of thing.

• 1:05:06Tom Bilyeu?

  So crazy.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  I have not seen persuasive evidence that Epstein's island with all the underage girls and everything like that was really a front for the Mossad. Or, and so by, by the way, I've seen it both ways. I've seen the CIA and Mossad.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  I don't know that, that I don't know that. And again, let's just use Occam's razor again, Tom, and I don't know where you are in this, but.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  It seems more likely that powerful men, people who would be friends with Epstein, wealthy men, ex-presidents like Bill Clinton and or Sean Combs or whoever,

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  like the idea of kind of, you know, sex with young women. That's been true about for a long time. I think Epstein clearly was a sexual, you know, was had a voracious sexual appetite. He had gazillions of dollars. And this is what he liked to do. And what it could just very well be that here's a guy who was doing the kind of thing that you, you know, I mean, going back to before the Roman Empire, you know, and powerful men. This is what they do. Did it necessarily mean that they were doing it in order to kind of have blackmail information on people? Again, I haven't seen that.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  What I've seen is some connections between Ghislaine Maxwell and I guess her father, you know, but that that's not proof.

• 1:06:43Tom Bilyeu?

  To me, though, this just seems and look, I get it. This is one of the conspiracies that I indulge in. I try not to indulge in conspiracies very often, but this one just seems too perfect. It's like, hey, guys, don't worry, we got it. Files coming out. Yep, yep. No worries. Oh, sorry. No file for you. Hey, we're going to be releasing that video. We just got to clean it up just real quick, like clean it up. What are you talking about? Release the video as it is.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  With you, but like, why do you think so?

• 1:07:10Tom Bilyeu?

  So nuts.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  What's in it for Bongino and Patel?

• 1:07:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, nothing. I don't think I think for them, this is a train wreck.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:07:17Tom Bilyeu?

  I why would they go along with it? Okay, so pure conjecture. I have no idea that this is true. Think of me as a science fiction writer right now, absolutely making something up, but it would go something like this.

• 1:07:30Tom Bilyeu?

  I was, I start out as just a person who really is idealistic. I'm working in the government and suddenly I'm being attacked. Then when I'm asked to be the person that comes in and like really, hey, do something for your country. Come in and do it. And you think, oh my God, okay, this is going to be a lot, but you know, you don't say no. Like when your country calls, you go in. So they both go in and then the men in black suits that Putin keeps talking about, telling everybody, you, you want to know why policy never changes? Because it's not the president that runs the country. It's men in black suits that come up and say, listen, this is how things really go. And they come in and they're like-

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Hold on, Tom, before you go, you don't think Trump's the decider?

• 1:08:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, here's the really bad news. Given how long Trump was friends with Epstein, oh buddy, can I just? I have a really hard time believing that that is not going to be in some way, shape or form, very inconvenient for him.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Hold on, hold on, wait, wait, so down, so down. Donald Trump had everything and the kitchen sink thrown at him. He was sued by multiple women for rape. He was accused by former heads of our own intelligence services of being a Russian asset. This is somebody who I think is immune to coercion in that regard. So what I'm saying is that I can't imagine there'd be anything on the Epstein stuff, the Epstein files, that would be even worse than what Trump has already been accused of and nearly, by the way, lost his freedom for. So, and his fortune for.

• 1:09:08Tom Bilyeu?

  When I look at that, I say, there's something fishy about the Epstein file and that I could easily see to your point about powerful men, just going to powerful men. And that this is every side of the aisle, every which way but loose. And so there's just, nobody wants this thing to get out there. It just seems impossible. Just release everything. Yeah, I'll remain sort of playfully suspicious until it gets released.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  I'm all for releasing everything. I think- The evidence now tells us that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But I still want to release all the stuff from the CIA. I did a whole podcast episode on that, which is pretty good.

• 1:09:51Tom Bilyeu?

  They did release everything, right?

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  They pretty much have. I mean, but what I'm saying is I was in favor of that disclosure. Because I just think it's our history. We have a right to it and better to kind of let it all out. I mean, unfortunately, I mean, that's a whole separate conversation about Kennedy. Even though in the end I don't believe there was a conspiracy. I just think the government response to it was so duplicitous that I understand why lots of people don't believe the official version of the Warren Report. And I think to a certain extent with Jeffrey Epstein, he clearly got favorable treatment initially from these legal allegations. Until, by the way, until he didn't, right?

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  But for years, I mean, like he had that, he had a sweetheart deal in Florida and everything like that. But the explanation for that is not that the deep state was protecting an asset. The explanation I see is that, oh, well, what does it tell us? It tells us something we already knew that wealthy, privileged people have a different standard of justice than the rest of us. You see what I'm saying? Like that, that we knew, I could have told you that from the OJ trial, right? I mean, like, that's just how it is. That's why people pay a lot of money for the best lawyers. It's why, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's why people donate to politicians. But I think there's a difference between control and like a system that we have where there's a lot of people who can buy influence,

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  but doesn't mean it's not the same as control.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  But that's not, I don't want to dismiss where you're coming from though, because we have a vast national intelligence bureaucracy, a vast national security state. I don't think it's the same as a deep state. But I do think that it's something that is overweening and needs more accountability. And we have to maybe rethink in some ways.

• 1:11:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Given that Israel is still not done with Hamas, how do they wrap that up? How do they decide like we've now got everybody or whatever? And then what do you make of how the public opinion has turned against them?

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it depends on what segment of the public opinion. Certainly younger people, certainly.

• 1:12:18Tom Bilyeu?

  And that's what I mean.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Largely.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Colleges and universities have. I mean, I think it's been turning even before October 7. I certainly hope that there's a close to getting the hostages back, which I think is sort of the remaining issue. But the real issue is that you can't have a remnant of Hamas still be in charge of Gaza. That's a red line. But I do think that, you know, Israeli elections, I don't think most Israelis want to reoccupy Gaza. I don't think it's a territorial expansion. I think that there are some Israelis who are in the cabinet, like Ben Gavir and Smotrich, who have a fantasy, but it's a fantasy that the Jews can settle in Gaza and so forth.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  I think it's going to have to be a huge kind of reconstruction of Gaza, but that reconstruction has to happen under a different leadership than Hamas. But I also think that we're fairly close and I have, even though there are these tragic stories of Palestinians waiting for food to be delivered by this new kind of humanitarian effort. I think it's called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the Israelis and I think Americans contractors have set up. To me, that is a ray of hope. And I think Hamas has been attacking these things and trying to do what they can as rapidly. Because I think that that removes the last bit of leverage that Hamas has over the population. I think the population in Gaza, we've seen some flickers of this,

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  are absolutely furious with the decisions that were made by their leaders that plunged them into war. Hamas started the war with October 7. I don't see how anybody could have expected the Israelis wouldn't respond with overwhelming force, which is what they did. I hate that the war has dragged on because it has been, it's been terrible for Palestinian civilians. I am not of the view that no one in Gaza is innocent. I think there are a lot of people who are innocent. I think the Gazans are double victims of Hamas and Israeli bombardment. And it's a tragedy. But I also kind of begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And I think that the victory in this 12 day

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  war is a big part of that. I mean, if there's any rational actors left in the remnants of Hamas leadership, they should be looking around at this point and saying to themselves, what are we fighting for? And that's, that's, that's hopefully where we're, where we're headed.

• 1:14:44Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it. Eli, man, I can't thank you enough for taking the time. Where can people follow you?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Well, make sure to subscribe to Breaking History. It's a great podcast. And read me at the Free Press. I'm a columnist there. And I am also contributing editor of Commentary Magazine.

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