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

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

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

• 0:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Adam, what's your point? The future looks bright.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  My handshake is better than anything I ever signed, right here.

• 0:16Patrick Bet-David?

  You are a one of one? My son's right there.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  I don't think I've ever said this before.

• 0:25Patrick Bet-David?

  So, we got a special guest here. There's gonna be a group of you that are gonna be driven insane by what he has to say, but there's gonna be many of you that are gonna say, "It's actually a good point." Like, even right now, with what's going on in the world. Venezuela, you know, just fell. Iran, with what they're going through. They went from a monarchy to, whatever you wanna call it, with, you know, a totalitarian regime under Khomeini. And then, should they go to constitutional monarchy? Should they go to a traditional democracy? What works, what doesn't work? My guest today, here's what he said before. So, brace for impact. We're gonna have a two-hour conversation, but these are some of the things that he said that's driven people insane. "Some races are more suited to slavery than others." That'll upset a lot of people, okay?

• 1:08Patrick Bet-David?

  "Democracy is not a solution, it is the problem." "The United States should be run like a corporation." "If Americans want change, they should stop voting." "The democratic experiment has failed." "Real power in America is held by an unelected regime." "Equality is not a natural human condition." "Order is more important than freedom." Curtis Yarvin, it's great to have you on.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, pleasure to be here, Patrick.

• 1:34Patrick Bet-David?

  So, how did you come up with these ideas? How did this happen?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  How did I come up with these ideas?

• 1:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  You know, my gosh. How did I come up with these ideas? As I was kind of a, you know, a little bit of a normie libertarian kind of person. And I started reading a little bit, and I started thinking a little bit. And after a little while, I'd had a little too much to think. And...

• 1:56Speaker 02

  I think that, you know, the way you come up with these ideas is you're sort of in... You ever seen the movie The Truman Show? Of course. You watch The Truman Show, it's a really, really great movie. And, you know, Truman, you know, just starts to notice these things about the world he lives in that just aren't, that aren't real, that can't possibly be real. You know, the sky, the horizon is kind of stitched together. You know, I'll give you an example of one of these things. That's very, very simple, which is that you have these two words, politics and democracy. Mm-hmm. And you might notice that analytically, these words mean the same thing. Do they?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Well, you know, what is democracy without politics? It sounds like something they might have in North Korea, you know. Actually, North, you know, the full name of North Korea is the DPRK. That's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That is three euphemisms for democracy, one place name, and it's a monarchy. And so, you know, this is one of the things that we sort of see across history is that, basically, regimes, well, they tend to lie. They tend to actually sort of, you know, conceal the most basic things about what they are. Let's go, for example, to the United Kingdom. It's not a kingdom.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  No one could possibly describe it objectively as a kingdom. It's true that it has a king, but the idea that the king is running the government is preposterous, okay? And everyone in the UK recognizes that the idea that the king is running the government is preposterous. It wasn't really true, let's say in 1725, that the king was running the government. That would be, I guess, George the First. But people really believed it was the case then. And so, you have these, you know, what we, you know, when we call the US a democracy, you know, it's actually much more similar to calling the United Kingdom a kingdom than we might think.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  One of the ways that you can see this is, again, if you look at these words, democracy and politics.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  You'll hear that they have opposite valences. So democracy, anything democratic is good. You know, we're going to democratize US foreign policy. I don't know what it means, but it has to be good. We're going to politicize US foreign policy. Clearly bad. Like, we don't want this to be political. The word "political" has acquired a negative valence. You know, we're going to put politicians in charge of the government. Politicians, nobody likes politicians. How should they be in charge of the government? And then you're just like, wait, but isn't having politicians in charge of the government what we mean when we say democracy? Moreover, when we look at actually the way that Washington DC works, I actually grew

• 4:59Speaker 02

  up, my father was in the US Foreign Service, in the State Department. So, I grew up in the State Department and they have very much this attitude of like, politics is this like dirty thing that needs to be kept out of government whenever possible. Right? It's like, you're sort of clearly seeing, okay, we have to kind of pretend to be this. But if you actually look at the way that US foreign policy changes when you have a presidential election, we'll get to Congress later, but you know, until Donald Trump, until Donald Trump's really second term, actually the influence of the election on foreign policy is pretty minimal.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  And the influence of the presidential election on domestic policy is almost zero, because domestic policy is run by Congress. And so, you know, we have these situations where everyone goes out in this election and they really think that they're, like, they talk as if they were electing a king. They say Donald Trump is in power. He's certainly not a negligible, you know, force in Washington. In fact, I'd say, you know, one way to look at the sort of the paradox of the Trump administration is to say, well-

• 6:24Speaker 02

  I think it's pretty unquestionable that the second Trump administration had maybe 10 times as much impact on Washington as the first Trump.

• 6:33Patrick Bet-David?

  There's no question.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  No question.

• 6:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Second, it sounds like it's been three terms in one.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  It could be this.

• 6:37Patrick Bet-David?

  In 12 months.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  It could be 10 times as much, could be 20 times as much.

• 6:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Why do you think that is?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  And if you look at, well, wait a second, there's a punchline. So if you look at the, if you compare the first Trump administration to the Bush administration, again, you know, it's not as much of a difference, but it's 3X, 5X, you know, as much of an impact. I mean.

• 6:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Trump to Bush.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Bush to Trump. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you remember the first Trump administration, it's like the liberals are like, the sky's falling every day.

• 7:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Right? And now they're like, the sky's falling every day. Right? And so.

• 7:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you saying him to Bush, he got three times more done? Or Bush to Trump, Bush got three times more done?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  No, but Trump, even the first term, Trump had three times as much impact as Bush. So the thing is, what you're seeing from the perspective of the New York Times reader, you're just like, oh, my God, this politician, this, you know, carnival barker has this immense power over the government, which is the most important thing around, and we're all gonna die. And it's like, well, even, you know, let's, let's acknowledge that these enormous increases in power are true. Okay? But, you know, power is, is something that you can measure on a zero to one scale. Zero is you have no power, you don't matter. One is absolute power.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  So if you're looking at anything that's measurable on a zero to one scale, you know, does she love me, does she love me not? You know, one way to look at that is to say, all right, let me forget about where I am on this scale relatively and figure out where I am on the scale absolutely. Because actually, when you're seeing those kinds of increases, you know, when you're seeing increases by an order of magnitude, for example, what you see is that those kinds of increases are most available at the bottom.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Of the absolute spectrum. So when you're going through-

• 8:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Meaning closer to zero, not closer to one.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Closer to zero, not closer to one. If you can multiply anything by a hundred and it's still less than one, it's gotta be a very small number. And so what people don't really realize about the post 1945 American political system is that it goes from, of course, 1945, FDR dies. FDR is pretty close to one. He's pretty close to being, to really having absolute power over the government, especially in wartime, but also before wartime. He's really running the government like a CEO. And if you look at like, you know, there's a diary I have of one of his cabinet secretaries. And you look at FDR's cabinet meetings,

• 9:22Speaker 02

  they're like a CEO running a C-suite meeting. Okay, if you look at one of Trump's cabinet meetings, it's not like that. No, it's really not like that because actually the government, the way that Washington today works is when you're a CEO of a company, I actually am a CEO of a company. When you're the CEO of a company, one of the sort of worst terms of like, you're not a good CEO is to say that you're reactive.

• 9:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  You're always reacting to things that happen. You're not making proactive decisions. You're not sort of steering. You're basically reacting to your inbound.

• 10:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Company's doing really well and doesn't really need a CEO. Maybe it's fine to have a reactive CEO. Okay. But FDR was a proactive CEO. You know, he could say, oh, we're gonna build, you know, look at like Route One, for example, on the California coast. That's an FDR project. That's a New Deal, I believe, California Conservation Corps project. Imagine building Route One today. Completely unimaginably impossible. It would be much harder than building the high-speed rail. Right? And so what you're seeing is you're seeing the state, which is almost entirely based on bureaucratic process.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  And when you're working in a process-based regime, everything is procedural, everything, you're almost, as a civil servant, you're almost something like a judge, in a way, because everything you're doing is following a process.

• 10:55Patrick Bet-David?

  But FDR needed a crisis. Without that, he wouldn't have the power that he had, right?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean-

• 11:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Take the crisis out, take the-

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, the way that FDR, I mean, the way that FDR gains this power is very specific to the 1930s. And so, for example, one of the things you'll see in 1932, when FDR is running in the election, the Democratic Party is, of course, America's traditional conservative party at this time. And it's been basically taken over from the inside by radical progressives. The first example of this is Woodrow Wilson.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  FDR comes back again with the same thing, but he's still running as a Democrat. And so, if you look at the 1932 political platform of Roosevelt, it's a traditional democratic platform, which means small government, less spending, hard money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And on this platform, he gets the votes of, you know, the solid South and the inner-city Catholics, which basically drive him, you know, into office. Be that as it may, forgetting, I mean, America in 1932 was such a different country from today.

• 12:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Night and day.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  More different from any country today on earth, right? But, you know, he managed to do that. He basically managed to create the new, he created the Washington that we have today. And so, you know, one of the things, if you step back and look at US history over the last 250 years, what you see is actually, you're seeing transitions between forms of government. You know how the French talk about the First Republic, Second Republic, Third Republic? So, in American history, we have three administrations that basically establish a regime. We have the Washington administration, which is actually run by Hamilton. We have the Lincoln administration and we have the FDR's administration.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  These things happen about every 75 or 80 years. They basically involve consolidation of the power of the federal government under a single individual. They basically, who is essentially a CEO of the government. This is what Hamilton and Washington were doing. This is what Lincoln was doing. This is what FDR is doing. Love them or hate them, you know, it's a neutral thing. They did plenty of good and bad things, both. You know, that's sort of, that's what creates an administration. If you look at, you know, being a California person, if you look at the New Deal, again, I think they did plenty of things wrong. I think they made plenty of terrible choices. They were also run like a startup.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  And so if you're looking for like a startup Washington, you know, basically look at, look at the New Deal. If you look, for example, at the Manhattan Project. You know, libertarians will basically be like, oh, well, the government can't do anything efficiently. Well, the Manhattan Project is number one, a government project. Number two, it is probably the most successful engineering project in history. Number three, it is run almost exactly like a California startup, right down to the two co-founders. Right? You have the technical guy and the non-technical guy. If you've seen Oppenheimer. And number four, they're all communists. If you've seen Oppenheimer.

• 14:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Of course.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Right? And, and so, you know, that's not, that combination of facts doesn't really fit into any kind of legendarium of the American political world.

• 14:25Patrick Bet-David?

  What's the point you're making? Your point you're making is?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  The point I'm...

• 14:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Run it like a startup, run it like a CEO, run it like a guy who's running a Fortune 100 company. Let him make the decisions, not a lot of executive orders. I don't need to get everyone's permission to do something.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  So if you look at, you know, I'm, I'm sort of trying to set the historical stage a little bit for where we are. So if you look at, you know, again, FDR creates the sort of, really, I mean, he literally conquers the world.

• 14:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Right? You know, and he creates this kind of world conquering state and people just looked at America at that time, whether they were Americans or foreigners, they're just like, this is a country, this is a government that can do anything. So FDR dies in 45, and in 44, he picks Harry Truman as his VP. Harry Truman is kind of a nobody. He's not even really a new dealer. He's a man of sort of limited pretensions and limited abilities. And FDR replaces Henry Wallace, who was kind of a hardcore communist, on his VP suite with Truman.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Knowing, FDR knows, nobody else knows, Americans did not even know that FDR used a wheelchair. You're aware of that, right? Like, that's the level of like, distance between reality and story that was totally routine back then. Right? And people just, people lived almost entirely in this comic book world. So, and, you know, on all sides, that war was fought in a comic book world. Um, you know, and World War I is even more sort of comic books. So you have basically a world where you have this very simplistic drama that's presented to a very unsophisticated, by today's standards, audience, right?

• 16:17Speaker 02

  So they just see this sort of propaganda experience of the war. They have no idea that FDR is dying. They have no idea of the difference between FDR and Truman. Actually, what happens is that because Truman is a lightweight, and he does not take over the job of FDR, he is not really in charge. This is what FDR intended. FDR is like, "I've assembled this amazing collection of just amazing, talented, first-rate people who can do anything, and I'm not going to have a successor." Instead, power is going to flow down into the regime, into the administration, into what we now call the deep state, and there's going to be no way, no way to get it out.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  What FDR didn't, um...

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Understand, really, or maybe understood but didn't care, who knows? Was that a regime like that has no way, simply because you have this administration that is almost impossible to get rid of, there's no sort of Darwinian constraint on its performance, especially if it's ruling the world and doesn't have to worry about Canada invading or something like that. And so, the effectiveness of this organization has just been getting worse and worse and worse for the last 80 years.

• 17:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Doesn't that validate that, you know, the, well, we can, we can come back to that. But the part I want to go with you on FDR is, would FDR have been FDR without a massive crisis? He used the crisis, right?

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 17:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Take the crisis out, he's not as historical figure as we would be talking about today.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  You can't really separate the man from his time. FDR is a pretty enigmatic figure. It's very, very hard to know what was going on in his head because he has not, you know, this regime has never been defeated. And so, when you look at a defeated regime, it's analyzed by its enemies, its enemies have...

• 18:19Patrick Bet-David?

  This is who? This regime?

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Um, FDR.

• 18:22Patrick Bet-David?

  The FDR regime?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  FDR's regime has never been defeated, right?

• 18:25Patrick Bet-David?

  You find out. What do you mean by that? Like, no one's outdone him? No one's done anything?

• 18:28Speaker 02

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

• 19:12Speaker 02

  You know, the Allies come in and what are you gonna do with the SS? Well, you might say, "Well, you know, what's the problem with this Nazi regime? Real problem is the Holocaust, you know, big problem. What's the cause of the Holocaust? Anti-Semitism in the SS." So, we're gonna stamp out anti-Semitism in the SS. And all the SS lunchrooms, anywhere in Germany, the new administration is gonna put posters, pro-Jew posters, and we're gonna make it clear that the SS is a pro-Semitic organization now. That's not what they did. That is not even close to what they did. Actually, the SS ceased to exist and actually, having been a member of this previously prestigious and powerful organization,

• 19:57Speaker 02

  became something shameful. Right? And, you know, love it or hate it, there were a lot of excesses in the Allied occupation of Germany, but you can't say it didn't work. And so, when I say that basically, nobody has overthrown the New Deal, that's essentially what I mean. Nixon and Reagan both make some attempts at various levels of government reorganization, as Trump has made various attempts. Really, you know, if you look at the number of federal employees, for example, through the 80s in the Reagan administration, you'll see it actually dips a little bit. And under Trump, it dips even more than that. It dips like 10% or so.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Okay, but still, if we're comparing that to denazification, you're still at 0.001% of that. So, for example, in 1945, they're like, "All right, we're gonna denazify Germany." Okay, what would that? You know, you can analogize that to de-woke-ification or something. Okay, how are we gonna denazify Germany? Well, we're gonna basically take all the books. That were published in Germany between 1933 and 1945. And if they are books that have any Nazi content, which of course, imagine, you know, all the books that have progressive content. Hmm. It's basically all of them. Sure. Okay, so what are we gonna do? Get rid of them.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Except for maybe children's books and not even accepting children's books. You see them as well, of course. Have you been to a bookstore? You go to a Barnes and Noble, you know, and you know how the Nazis burned books? You know, everyone's seen the picture of the Nazis burning books. This is a bunch of Nazi stormtroopers burning the library of the Institute for Sexual Research, which was the kind of key Weimar trans institution. They had a big, you know, big celebration, you know, throw gasoline on the books, whatever. It's very dramatic. Okay, the Allies in Germany in 1945 are very different from that. They're like, all right, it's gonna be illegal to own any Nazi books, which are basically any books published in the last 12 years. And what are we gonna do with these books? We're gonna pull them. They didn't burn them, they just turned them into toilet paper.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  You can find these books in Germany today. Okay, I don't think it's illegal to possess them anymore. You're not gonna find them randomly in a used bookstore. You can buy them in certain ways. Libraries have them and, you know, major libraries. And if you wanna go and read these books, you will show that you have a legitimate academic need to read these books. Okay? Like you'll, you'll need to present like academic credentials. Sure. So imagine treating progressivism that way. Okay? I'm not saying that this is what needs to be done. This is every historical situation is different. You had the enormous power that was generated at that time by winning a war. Right?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  But when we use, you know, this kind of language that Donald Trump uses, you know, he uses this very like crossing the Rubicon kind of language, like we're gonna change everything, this is a revolution, you know? You've gotta basically check yourself and say, no, this is point 001.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  of a revolution and when you have a real regime change in a country everyone's life changes.

• 23:17Speaker 03

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• 23:46Speaker 04

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• 24:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, why don't we do this? Can we do this? Just so the audience knows, because some of the audience doesn't know who you are. Okay, they're kind of wondering saying, who is this Curtis Yarvin guy? Uh, you're uh, uh, uh, very well known in the Peter Thiel, in the Elon Musk, in the tech bro billionaire Silicon Valley or something. They know who you are and you know, a lot of guys have said, you know, your ideas have been revolutionary, they follow it, we should consider what Curtis has to say. And then the likes of New York Times and others are going to say this guy's crazy. He has no clue what he's talking about and he's the secret mastermind behind Trump and all the ideas that's coming up. That's kind of how they're depicting who you are. If, if you could describe to the audience in less than 60 seconds, what do you believe in? What would that be?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Ah, gosh, what do I believe in and what would that be? Um, I would say what I believe is that

• 25:05Speaker 02

  In America, we're living inside this, you might say, 250-year-old myth of American governance. Every state, every nation, every polity has a political formula. It has a reason that it believes that its political system is right and just and true. And actually, if you're looking at Anglo-American governance, you're really going back more like 400 years. And so, I essentially believe that the things that we think we've learned in the Anglo-American political tradition, since essentially Elizabeth I, are basically not true. I think that actually, the reasons for the success of the Anglo-American world

• 25:50Speaker 02

  are very different from the reasons that we think this success happened. And I actually just don't believe in our political system at all.

• 25:59Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't believe in our political system?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  I don't believe in it.

• 26:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so, you know, democracy-monarchy, right? The longest lasting democracy, when you look at the numbers, you know, on most articles, they'll say it's us, 238 years, and you'll see a bunch of different countries in democracies.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Switzerland.

• 26:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Switzerland, yeah, we've seen these, right? And then if you go to monarchies, you'll see Japan at the top, 2,600 years. You'll see, you know, some real interesting Sweden. You'll see Morocco, you'll see UK, you'll see Norway, I think, some of these countries.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Sure, but you have to distinguish, actually, you know, not every democracy is a real democracy, not every monarchy is a real monarchy.

• 26:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Perfect.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  One of the most important things, I think that, you know, if there's a single book that I'd recommend to sort of, you know, for basically smart, curious people to sort of, you know, develop the skill of doing this kind of Truman Show thing of looking for, you know, when does this word mean its opposite? When was, there's a great book published by James Burnham in 1940. He's better known for the book The Managerial Revolution, but his best book is actually a book I found in a used bookstore very randomly. It's called The Machiavellians. And it's a...

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Essentially, a very brief, readable, well-written summary of what's called the Italian School of Political Science with writers from around 1900 in Italy. This is, of course, well before Mussolini, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these writers were realists. They were profoundly realistic and they insisted that the most important thing is to basically sort of abandon these symbolic statements and to see reality for what it really is. And so, when you're decoding things, like you have this word "democracy." Democracy today, in the modern world, means legitimate government.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  That's again, when you claim to be democratic, you claim to be legitimate because we live in this sort of global democratic empire created by 1945 and even 1815, you might argue. And so, this is why North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. They have to claim to be democratic because that is a claim of legitimacy. Nonetheless, anyone can look at it for five seconds and say, "No, this is actually a dynasty." Right? The Kim family. Right? So, when we look at, you know, our democracy, to sort of go back to the basics in a way, or what we call a democracy, I would say that generally speaking, there, you know,

• 28:46Speaker 02

  to paraphrase Aristotle, who knew everything about government, there are three forms of government. You have government of the one, the few, and the many. So Aristotle called these monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. So if you use the word "democracy" in today's political language, you mean one of two things. If you're George Soros, for example, or someone from Soros world... When you use the word democracy, you mean what is sometimes called meritocracy, sometimes called civil society. You mean the power of prestigious institutions, you know, the power of the experts.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  You know, democracy is, by definition, a legitimate government, which means it's good government, which means it's government guided by the best experts. Who would you have it guided by? You know, some shoemaker? You know, there's a famous cartoon in The New Yorker. Came out a couple of years ago, where it's in the back of an airplane, and the passengers are, there's some passenger stood up and is speaking, and he's saying something like, you know, "Why should we let these arrogant pilots, who think they know all about flying airplanes, you know, like fly the plane? You know, I demand to, you know, I demand a vote of the people to elect how to fly the plane." Right?

• 30:13Speaker 02

  No one who saw this cartoon, there you go. No one who saw this cartoon thought that they were laughing at democracy. No one, you know, looks at this cartoon, opens their New Yorker and says like, "This is an anti-democracy cartoon." It is plainly an anti-democracy cartoon. It is plainly a cartoon about the absurdity of the literal word "democracy." Because in fact, when you use the words like, you know, meritocracy and civil society and the rule of experts, the Aristotelian word is very, very plain. You're talking about an oligarchy. You're talking about an institutional oligarchy. If these institutions believed in God,

• 30:57Speaker 02

  you would call it a theocracy without a second look. It's a regime very similar to the, you know, in ancient Egypt, you know, 3,000 years ago, they had the rule of the priests of Amun. You know, same exact system. Right? And the role that elections serve in the system is not too dissimilar to the role that the King of England serves in England. Right? It's not quite that, because, you know, Trump is like, Trump is a little like George III in some ways, in that he's trying to revive the power of a kind of dying institution.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  So that, you know, the president-

• 31:36Patrick Bet-David?

  A dying institution.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  The presidency. Because the presidency is very much going the way of, it's turning into President Camacho from mediocrity. It's very much going the way of the British monarchy in becoming almost entirely ceremonial. And so, and, and-

• 31:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Why do you say that?

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Uh-

• 31:55Patrick Bet-David?

  It's losing its power?

• 31:56Speaker 02

  The reality, its power is, its power, it's been losing its power for eighty years. It lost most of its power in nineteen forty-five when FDR died.

• 32:03Patrick Bet-David?

  From Truman? Due to Truman or due to FDR?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Due to, due to the death of FDR. And there was no way that anyone could have stepped into FDR's shoes.

• 32:10Patrick Bet-David?

  So you're a big supporter of what FDR did?

• 32:12Speaker 02

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

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Maybe just a little nudge and it'll snap back into actually working perfectly. Because it's a perfect system, after all. And, in fact, if you look at the sort of, you know, let's go back to this thing of like democracy versus politics. So, this idea that politics and politicians are bad is the idea that democracy is, literal democracy is bad. Because there's another thing that we mean when we say democracy, we mean- Putting politicians in charge of the government, right? And we mean populism. And so what we have is basically the sort of the political landscape of the mind today

• 33:41Speaker 02

  is that populism and meritocracy are fighting over this magic word democracy, which defines legitimacy. And everyone is like, well, this is democracy, you know? And, you know, the George Soros's of the world are just like, well, you know, obviously having the best people in charge is democracy. And the Donald Trumps of the world are like, no, actually, democracy is when elected politicians control the government. This is severely complicated in the American system by the fact, and this is something else that... So, a lot of the things that I'm saying are things that are sort of quite obvious if you kind of think about them from a distance, but they are things that neither party is

• 34:25Speaker 02

  going to tell you, each for its own reasons.

• 34:27Patrick Bet-David?

  What are you suggesting? What do you want to see?

• 34:31Speaker 02

  What do I want to see? Well, that's a long, that's a long, you know, it's like, let me, let's start with the diagnosis a little bit first, because understanding kind of how we got here, I want to, I'm a monarchist, I want to see monarchy.

• 34:43Patrick Bet-David?

  You want to see monarchy?

• 34:44Speaker 02

  I basically see that, you know, in this kind of context between populism and meritocracy for this magic word democracy, you know, and if we were to use Aristotle's categories in a scientific way, we would said it's a contest between oligarchy and democracy. And I think one of the things that you see if you look at the sort of the red versus blue conflict in America, and I think this is true about a lot of different kinds of conflict historically, is that whenever you see a conflict, the sort of, the interpretation of that conflict that should jump into your mind is that maybe each side is basically right about the other.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  And so you must know, you know, a couple that's always fighting, right? And you're like, well, you know, the problem is, he's kind of right about her, but she's also kind of right about him.

• 35:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Right? And I think that actually what animates most people in America politically today is not so much affection for their own model as fear and loathing of the other model. And so if you grew up, you know, like me, you know, New Yorker readers, State Department, Ivy League kind of house, this is a house, this is my, my cultural background is definitely America's ruling elite. Uh, there's a lot of people more culturally elite than me. But for example, my father's parents were American communists. They were literal Jewish communists. They had cards. I don't know where the cards are, but they had, you know, card carrying communists, did they carry the card? Did they keep it somewhere?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  All I know is from the 30s to the 70s, they had cards.

• 36:25Patrick Bet-David?

  How did that not pass down to your dad?

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Um, that's a good question. I think that that's sort of the transition between the old left and the new left. You've probably heard the term red diaper baby. So, you know, you have the old left, which is kind of the Stalinist left, and that left kind of dies and runs out of gas in the 50s especially. Like, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of that is dying in like 1956, for example, with, with Hungary. So, you know, the Communist Party USA is sort of the most excited, most exciting and most fun in the 1930s. In the 1930s, it's, you saw Oppenheimer, right? Oppenheimer is made from the most liberal biography of Oppenheimer available.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Actually, Oppenheimer himself probably was not only a communist, but actually the head of the communist cell in the Berkeley Physics Department. What's clear, and what the movie makes clear to you to its credit, is that everybody else is a communist. In fact, everybody in the 1930s who's cool is a communist. Dorothy Parker, communist. Charlie Chaplin, communist. Everybody's a communist, it's normal. And, um, do you know what the word they used to describe? The word communist in the 1930s means party member. This is also what it meant in the, in the eastern block. You couldn't, it's like calling yourself a hell's angel just because you ride a motorcycle. No, you're not a hell's angel unless you're a hell's angel. Right?

• 37:50Patrick Bet-David?

  So you have to be a true communist.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  You have to be a true, yeah, it's not just an expression of opinion. It's actually a status. And if you're kicked out of the party in the 1930s, you lose all your friends. If you're a Hollywood screener, you lose your job. It's like a closed union shop. Basically communism in the 1930s in America is like, what if all the kids at the gifted school tried to take over the world? That's basic.

• 38:14Patrick Bet-David?

  And what benefits did they get from being a hard carrying communist among your grandparents?

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Uh, my, my grandparents, uh, were, they moved up about four levels in the social hierarchy because they were basically, um, they were garment industry Jews. You know, they were, they were Yiddish speaking Jews. They were, these are shit tier Jews, right? You know, they become communists and like all of their, you know, I'm, I'm just like, as a kid, I'm like, why is my grandmother's best friend a distributor of Italian films? Communist, right? You know? And so, because she's a humble person, she's, makes boiled chicken, she's a school teacher in the New York City schools, right? You know, but actually she has these tremendous intellectual pretensions. She had this tremendous intellectual energy and that led all of these people into the world of communism.

• 39:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you spend a lot of time with your grandma? Um, or grandpa?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Some, but you know what the funny thing is? They would actually, the only reason I knew that they were actual literal communists was through my parents. They would, even as an adult and not even knowing that I was a blogger or anything, they were just, they were naturally completely secretive about it. And do you know what word that was always used by these people to describe themselves and their supporters in general in the 1930s?

• 39:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Progressive.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Progressive.

• 39:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Makes sense. So they hid behind that word.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  They, well, that word.

• 39:34Patrick Bet-David?

  It's a little safer than communism.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the word progressive, um, basically you will find it.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  used, for example, in the teens by Teddy Roosevelt and people like that. And Teddy Roosevelt is really more of an American fascist, almost in a way. Uh, he's certainly not a communist. But for about a hundred years, the word progressive has meant communist. Right?

• 39:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so, so mom and dad, uh, grandpa, just, just stay on that for a second. When you're hanging out with them, are they teaching you? Curtis, when you grow up, these are the things that matter. Here's what you got.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  No, I think that they lost most of their energy by the 1970s. I think most of, and that energy had become, had fed into a more sort of diluted. Uh, it had become the new left. And the new left, you know, the, the, the principal difference between the new left and the old left is that the old left is centralized in the Communist Party USA. The new left is decentralized. The new left has no center, nobody's in charge of it. And you're like, oh, well, you know, at least we're not Stalinists anymore.

• 40:37Patrick Bet-David?

  How did that happen?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Um, it happened because

• 40:43Speaker 02

  it was increasingly difficult. Well, it happened, first of all, because of the Cold War. Because Stalin actually, you know, it was Stalin's decision to get divorced after the war. Like, the US did not want to get divorced. Stalin made it very clear during the war, American liberals and progressives had seen Russia as their kind of strong right arm that would help them control the world, basically. So you see, you know, uh, there's all this amazing pro-communist stuff during the 40s. Films like Mission to Moscow and so forth, just insane Stalinist propaganda, totally flooding the American airways. Forty-five, Stalin decides, no, actually, I, I'm not your little dog. Um, who knows how this would have played out if FDR hadn't died.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Stalin's like, no, I'm actually a peer. And that creates a great split in the American left. Because the American left in 35, 36 had formed this, what was called the Popular Front, where liberals allied with communists.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Or communists allied with liberals, because it was always like, you know, the communists were sort of the more desirable party in that. It was like the liberals were always trying to get with the communists, basically. And the communists were like, oh, get away from me, liberal. Right? You'll, you'll see them do that now. And

• 42:02Speaker 02

  When that breaks, you get basically this breach in the American left, where the majority of American liberals, and I mainly include people who are not working for the Soviet Union, but sort of saw the Soviet Union as working for them,

• 42:24Speaker 02

  which was sort of the view at the top of the Roosevelt administration. Stalin decisively breaks that myth and causes these American liberals to realize, "Oh, we're not creating one progressive world government under the United Nations. We have two competing progressive world empires." These empires would still go after like the old British and French world. They would, you know, for example, in 56, the US and the USSR are aligned against Britain and France in the Suez Crisis, right? So there's still like, you know, this kind of deep ideological tie between the two, and that tie goes all the way from 1917 to 1989. So for example, in the 80s, there's this thing where-

• 43:09Patrick Bet-David?

  17 to 89?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, the whole life of the Soviet Union. It has very complicated, deep relationships with the American left. Probably too deep to go into here. But for, you know, here's an example of this. So in, I think it was 84, this was revealed only after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 84, Teddy Kennedy sends his, basically, chief conciliary John Tunney secretly to Moscow to talk within drop-off about the, um, their strategy in the 84 election, in which Teddy Kennedy didn't end up running. I think it was 84, it could have been 80, I think it was 84. So you have all of these like, deep, deep, deep, deep, see?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  You know, you have all of these-

• 43:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Tony, a former US senator, California correspondent, Teddy Kennedy is known for making confidential trips to Moscow in the 1880s.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  1980s.

• 44:02Patrick Bet-David?

  A very detailed, top-secret KGB memorandum published in 92, which revealed that Tunney served as a back-channel to Soviet officials. 1980 visit. Ted Kennedy primarily challenged, to challenge Carter. Tunney traveled to Moscow to devise a strategy to counter what Kennedy perceived as Carter's excessive anti-Soviet stance. You gotta be kidding me.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  It's right there on the screen, right, you know? And this is Wikipedia, I didn't make it up.

• 44:29Patrick Bet-David?

  He stayed in politics forty years and nothing happened to him.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so, so, so like, the relationship between the US and the USSR is, it's not at all like the relationship between the US and Hitler. It's not, it's like, the relationship between the, the Cold War is sort of like, imagine you're a parent, I have a teenager, I have a couple of teenagers, and sometimes teenagers turn out bad. You know, they get into heroin, they start stealing money from your purse.

• 44:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  You know, they do awful, awful things. But it's not like a stranger broke into your house and stole money out of your wife's purse. You know, and so there's always this kind of feeling of like a deep family tie there, which I think is something that they tried very hard to, you know, because there was this always this, basically, for all of the 20th century, you had this idea that there were two lefts.

• 45:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  You know how there's two lefts, you know, the communists and the liberals, and if you call a liberal a communist, you know, it's the worst thing in the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 45:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  And you look at basically the left now, and you're just like, come on. Don't, you're just yanking my chain. The idea that there's two lefts today, like, you're just yanking my chain. There is not two lefts. And, you know, this, of course, is first kind of recognized by the first, I mean, really, the first new left president is Carter. But, you know, the first really acknowledged new left president is Obama. And so, again, with Obama, you're probably familiar, being a, you know, conservative podcaster, you're probably familiar with some of the, you know, the interesting stories around the mysterious past of Mr. Barack Obama. Um, and I think most of those stories are...

• 46:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Which one's most mysterious to you? So I've heard many of them, but you're more well-read on this topic, so...

• 46:15Speaker 02

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

• 46:59Speaker 02

  I would say no more than 5% of them know that it is, is, or ever was, in any sense, a euphemism for communist. They have no idea. They're like, you know, in New Mexico, one of the things that, um, you know, in the wild experience of Spanish colonization, a lot of Jews and conversos from Spain fled to the New World. So there are these populations of conversos in New Mexico, like old Spanish, not, you know, and they do strange things with candles and napkins, and they have no idea why. They don't know that they're Jews, right? And so, in a way, that's kind of the state of the new left. They actually don't know that they're communists.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  They don't understand that this is completely their heritage. And that, and yet, when you look at it, you see it all over the place.

• 47:50Patrick Bet-David?

  The new left doesn't know they're communist?

• 47:52Speaker 02

  They sort of do, and they sort of don't.

• 47:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Like AOC, Mamdani, Obama?

• 47:56Speaker 02

  They know, they, they sort of, they, they see it from the inside, in a way, and so they, they perceive themselves in sort of, in opposition to liberals, and they'd basically be like, "Oh, no, we're not Stalinists." Like Stalinists are like, you know, there's a lot of, if you know the logical fallacy, no true Scotsman, you know, you basically get, you know, "Real communism has never been tried," you know, "Stalin actually betrayed communism," you know. Here's another fun story that your, your researchers can bring up easily. Do you know the name Stanley Levison?

• 48:26Patrick Bet-David?

  No.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  So Stanley Levison was, um, until 1956, I think he was not, it was not an official title, but he was basically the CFO of the Communist Party USA. He was a kind of ran its financial operations. And in 56 or 55, really, he realizes that the writing is on the wall for being a minion of Stalin. It's like McCarthyism has happened. It's like, you know, it's just Hungary has happened. Like, it's just not, it's not, it's not the vibe. It's not the thing.

• 49:06Speaker 02

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

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Levison was influential in creating the SCLC. Go to the SCLC's page?

• 49:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Nothing.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Don't mention, nothing. He's not on the page. He's not on the page. And so like, this is the-

• 50:05Patrick Bet-David?

  That was instrumental in all the activities at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization established by Dr. King and other Southern black preachers to further the cause of civil rights he had initially been introduced.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Go to the SCLC page.

• 50:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Go to the SCLC.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Search for Levison.

• 50:20Speaker 03

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• 50:48Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Man, you know, like, you've seen The Truman Show. You're like, why does that car come around every, every hour? You know?

• 51:27Patrick Bet-David?

  So, but what, what does this mean to, to, to a guy like you? How do you process this information? So, did they use, did they use MLK to?

• 51:37Speaker 02

  It's, it's, no, it's just that it's like,

• 51:42Speaker 02

  you know,

• 51:45Speaker 02

  when you see an organization, you know, government, a non-government, you know, you can never be sure that it is what it says it is. And so, you know, basically for, um, you know, even now, like, it's like, we accept all these sort of lies without question. We see a politician reading a speech and we're like, well, we didn't know he, he, he didn't really write that speech. Maybe he helped edit it a little bit, maybe he marked it up. But he's reading someone else's speech, you know?

• 52:14Patrick Bet-David?

  You're saying I Have a Dream was written by him?

• 52:16Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, he didn't write his own speeches. This is common, this is well-known history.

• 52:22Patrick Bet-David?

  So, I Have a Dream speech wasn't written by Martin Luther King?

• 52:25Speaker 02

  No, he didn't write his own speeches. He might have written A Letter from a Birmingham Jail, because he was actually in the Birmingham Jail, but I'm not, you know, completely confident of that. If he wrote A Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he was plagiarizing his own speechwriters. You know?

• 52:38Patrick Bet-David?

  And he, Stanley was one of the speechwriters?

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Go back, Rob, on the, on the previous, uh... Go back one page on the, oh, right there. Martin Luther, I have a dream speech, but it was collaborative effort on key contributions from his lawyer and speechwriters, Clarence B. Jones, businessman Stanley Levinson.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Businessman Stanley Levinson.

• 52:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, businessman, not communist, and other advisors who drafted, provided input and gave him some.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  I think Jones is also communist, you know, I mean.

• 53:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Clarence is also communist?

• 53:01Speaker 02

  But, well, you know, I don't know the first half.

• 53:04Patrick Bet-David?

  I just want to read you one more thing because while you were speaking, I read this one part. Go back on the previous page. Go to the RFK side. It's like five sentences from the bottom. In 1963, following the revelation of Dr. King's circle, that Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, R. F. Kennedy, and then John F. Kennedy had pressured Dr. King in person to break with Levinson and Jack Odell. But Levinson. Also communist? Also communist?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:29Patrick Bet-David?

  But Levinson, Levinson continued to advise Dr. King privately until Dr. King's assassination in April of 68. And afterwards Levinson continued to work with Dr. King's wife, Coretta Scott King, the Poor People's Campaign in DC that took place from May 12 to 18.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Of course, he's actually the CEO, right? You know, and like, he's actually the CEO, right?

• 53:49Patrick Bet-David?

  So MLK's communist ties to Levinson?

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it was, you know, the thing is, if you pull back to the bigger picture, basically, even the term civil rights. So basically, what you had was in the 30s with cases like, for example, the Scottsboro Boys, which were, was George Floyd in the 1930s. You know, you had this, basically, black nationalism and black liberation, huge, huge cause of the Communist Party in the 20s and 30s. If you look up the phrase of self-determination in the black belt, for example, that's a 1920s era communist slogan. And they actually imagined having black SSRs in like Alabama, like Soviet, actually parts of the Soviet

• 54:36Speaker 02

  Union. And, and, and like, you know, because the Soviet Union was intended to be a world government, of course, right? You know, and it wasn't Russian, it was started in Russia. And, you know, not really by Russians either, right? And so you have all of these things that are basically, you know, 20th century stories, which.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  When you look at them with a 21st century historical view and you're trying to find the reality rather than the narrative, you basically see that the reality is like very, very different from the narrative. It's like FDR being in a wheelchair. So what Levison was doing was simply basically taking a Communist Party initiative from the 20s and 30s and laundering it as what we now call the Civil Rights Movement, right? So completely, just no question of this history. It's like, all the details are kind of readily acknowledged. If you look at like David Garrick's King biography, you know, it's all gonna be

• 55:48Speaker 02

  in there, right? You know, and you can actually tell the truth about it now. Maybe not quite in the way that I'm telling it, because I'm telling it in a way that makes it sensational, because I believe it actually is sensational, right? And, and it's kind of amazing what happened here. It's, it's kind of wild and it's sort of like, of course, when we see these other regimes of the 20th century, we sort of expect them to be Orwellian. We expect people to not understand what's going on in their own country. But like, you know, the reality is, like, what is America in the 1960s? It's basically three TV stations, ABC, CBS, and NBC, plus for the ruined class, NPR and PBS. And it is a very controlled,

• 56:33Speaker 02

  very tightly organized broadcast media environment. If you look at basically during both world wars, you'll see what we call, conservatives call it MSM, is actually a government agency. So in World War II, it's the Office of War Information, OWI. OWI is basically the mainstream media as a government agency. World War I, it's the Committee on Public Information, the CPI. Insane, wild propaganda. You ever take a look at like, you know, World War I propaganda and you're just like... This is propaganda for 11 year olds. Like, this is incredibly simplistic, incredibly crude. Like, why are we fighting in Germany?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  The Hun is gonna come rape your sister with his spike helmet, right? You know? And it's like, you look at the reality of the diplomatic, you know, machinations, you know, behind that, which is easily as complicated as anything going on in Washington today. And you're just like, actually, this is for children. And, and so, in a way, waking up from this kind of, this dream to realize-

• 57:39Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you, though?

• 57:40Speaker 02

  How do you wake up from the dream?

• 57:42Patrick Bet-David?

  I mean, to the average person, no, I'm being serious with you. Because, to the ab- so you're telling me in 1917 to 89, a Teddy Kennedy who wants to run for office against Jimmy Carter, has to send a guy, okay, to Russia-

• 57:58Speaker 02

  A drop-off.

• 57:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, to meet with them and say he is more pro-Soviet than Carter. For what? Hey, help him become a president?

• 58:06Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 58:07Patrick Bet-David?

  And what, why would you want to? So, does that mean you needed Russia to get elected at that time?

• 58:12Speaker 02

  I don't know that you needed Russia to get elected, but it was like, more like, we're gonna kind of coordinate our efforts so that things sort of look good on all sides.

• 58:21Patrick Bet-David?

  But who cares? Why do I need Russia? So, if you're talking about election interference, I mean, that's like-

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a different, that's a different world.

• 58:28Patrick Bet-David?

  But that's truly Russian election interference.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  It's more that you still had a sense in the new left of the 80s. Consider, for example, the nuclear freeze movement from back then. Remember that? You know, maybe you're about to see, born in the 70s, like-

• 58:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Seventy-eight, yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, 73. So, you know, if you remember sort of the peace movement of the 1980s, like, actually, Russia is quite deeply involved in that. They're still in the habit, uh, in the 80s, of giving basically bunches of money to left-wing movements all around the planet, certainly including the US. Now, yeah, is this a sort of a little, a shadow of the way it used to be? It's a shadow of the way it used to be because, uh, you know, before the Cold War, like, just completely crazy stuff went on. Uh, you know, I'm, I mean- But like you go, you know, all the way back to the past and you find like,

• 59:25Speaker 02

  you go all the way back to 1917 and you find very deep ties between American progressive elements and early USSR, right? Again, completely. So for example, if you, this was one of my little, little, little red pills. If you look at the Russian Civil War, for example,

• 59:51Speaker 02

  today's historians will tell you without blinking an eye that the US sided with the white Russians, the anti-communists in the Russian Civil War. Technically, this is true. All the events on the ground were as such. In fact, however, the strategy certainly of Wilson is actually to prevent the British and the French from aiding the whites. In some, some ways, he has to do this by actually, he actually sends troops, but the troops are not there to help defeat the Bolsheviks. They're actually there to sandbag any attempt to defeat the Bolsheviks. So they're sort of kept sort of too weak. It's like a Bay of Pigs type thing in a way. And, and if you look at the relationship between Wilson and Lenin, you notice something

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  very interesting about that, which is that there's a lot of vituperation coming from, especially Lenin to Wilson. Wilson is always stretching out his hand to Lenin and Lenin is always slapping it away. And you're like, wow, these fanatical Russians just hate America or something like that. Well, you know, point seven of the 14 points is basically hands off the Bolsheviks. You know, Wilson is a revolutionary world leader. He's trying to revolutionize the world. He has this conflict, there's this sort of division in American socialism between Wilson and Debs. And basically, Debs, the IWW leader, is the kind of candidate of all the cool kids.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  And all the cool kids really, really love the Russian Revolution. Or if you've, you've heard of like John Reed, for example, you know, an excellent film about this period, about early American communism is a film called Reds. It was made in the 1980s. It has got Jack Nicholson in it. It has, everyone is in it.

• 1:01:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Warren Beatty is in it?

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Warren Beatty is playing John Reed. And John Reed is the only American-

• 1:01:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Produced and directed by Warren Beatty?

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  John Reed, who Warren Beatty is playing-

• 1:01:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Is the only American buried in the wall of the Kremlin. Right? So, you know, the level to which, basically, communism did not come out of Russia, communism came to Russia. And the, uh, and it came to Russia through people like John Reed. And,

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  you know, what happens, basically, as soon as the Russian revolution happens, is it sort of breaks into these two sides, the kind of liberal Kerensky side and the radical Lenin side. And Lenin is sexy.

• 1:02:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Who saw this and said, "We can run with these ideas"?

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Uh, American progressives, basically, were like, so there's something called the Red Cross Mission to Russia, which was basically the American embassy to the Bolsheviks. And this-

• 1:02:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Rabinpolab Red Cross Mission to Russia?

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Uh, this was actually really the Wall Street Mission to Russia. Um, and they were working quite closely, I mean, at the time, the business of, um, um, yeah, this is kind of a cover story. Um, you know, at the time, the business of sponsoring revolutions abroad was very, very lucrative. Because this is kind of a 19th century thing. You kind of, this is, the British perfected this. You like sponsor the revolution and then you support the revolutionaries and the revolutionaries give you big, big, big, big contracts. Right? And so, all through the twenties, even when the US did not recognize Russia,

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  and it was almost, I don't know the legalities, but it was quasi-illegal to deal with Russia, huge amounts of American investment is Russia, is rushing into Russia. So you look, for example, at someone like Avril Harriman, one of the titans of the mid-century diplomatic establishment. He's later, um-

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  US Ambassador to Russia and of course becomes a Cold War figure. Avril Harriman is the son of Edward Harriman, a huge railroad tycoon. You wouldn't expect him to be a Bolshevik. And yet Avril Harriman is given, I believe by Stalin, huge manganese concessions in Soviet Georgia in the 1920s. And so there's all of this actually like really deep involvement there between the, if you search for manganese, it might be there.

• 1:04:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Manganese.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Manganese.

• 1:04:16Patrick Bet-David?

  M A N G.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  M A N G. But it might not.

• 1:04:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Manganese concessions.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:04:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, 1917. You're going back to it.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Woodrow Wilson, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson. If you rearrange actually the name of your podcast from PBD to BPD, um, you know, there's a certain kind of relationship that you have with a person with borderline personality disorder. Right? You know? And the BPD girl, right? Lenin is the BPD girl. Wilson is the like hopeless schlub who like wants to date Lenin. And, you know, Lenin will be like, lick my boot, you know, and Wilson will bend down and industriously lick, lick, lick Lenin's boot. And Lenin will be like, you didn't even lick the bottom part. That's the part that gets dirty. What the hell? You must hate me. Right? You know, that was kind of the vibe between.

• 1:05:27Patrick Bet-David?

  So Lenin controlled Wilson?

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  No, controlled, Lenin manipulated Wilson. It was more like basically the BPD bitch isn't in charge of you. I'm sorry if you're using that word.

• 1:05:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  She's not in charge of you. She's just manages to manipulate you. And so Wilson, for example, is a major, major influence in making sure the British and the French don't wipe out the USSR after World War I, which they have every inclination and every power to do. Right? And so the USSR in a way starts its life as an American protectorate.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  In a way that is really, really, really, really hidden from Americans then and even now. So, like, actually, this is a very, very deep and complicated relationship. It is funky, it is not at all simple, and the Cold War interpretation of it sort of simplifies it in a way. Even if you look at 1950s McCarthyist anti-communists, are they right? Yeah, they're right, but they're also wrong. They're right in a sense because they're right that, wow, we had this really relationship with the USSR that's like really strange.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  But they interpret this relationship as kind of, they interpret it in this kind of nativist way, like, the thing about the Russians is that they're foreign, they're weird and foreign. You can see this in all their, like, Russian collusion stuff. They're like foreigners, or, you know, contaminating our water supply, or something, something, something, our precious bodily fluids. You know, in fact, you know, there are certainly Americans who are pawns of the Soviet Union in this period, but the most influential liberal Americans are not, do not see themselves as working for the Soviet Union. They would have been utterly baffled by the idea that they were working for the Soviet Union. They saw the Soviet Union as working for them.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  That is a completely, completely, that is also a heinous relationship, considering the crimes of the Soviet Union, which are really at their worst in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union is most popular in America.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  But that is a very different relationship. So, you know, for example, one, one of my historical theses that I'm pretty sure of, but that can't probably really be proved, is I think FDR was completely knowledgeable about what Alger Hiss was doing. Alger Hiss was not a spy, he was not a traitor, he was a back-channel.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  And, you know, to basically someone like Alger Hiss in Washington in, say, 1942, you know, would basically be like, "Look, we share all of our intelligence with the British, but not with the Russians." You know, "But the Russians are actually a progressive power like us, whereas the British are stuck in the mode imperialists." You know, "Why shouldn't we be working more closely with the Soviets?" And then the Soviets would basically do this BPD thing where, you know, so for example, there's something called the Doolittle Raid in early in World War II, where it's kind of America's 9/11, but in reverse, we kind of, we can't really attack Japan at this point.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  We mount this stunt where we're gonna basically fly American bombers off of carriers, land-based bombers off of carriers, on a one-way trip to just drop some bombs on Tokyo somewhere, somehow, and just kill some Japanese, and then they're gonna land in China. And it was actually kind of a success in a way, but some of these aircraft, they don't land in China, they wind up in the Soviet Union, which at the same time is fighting, you know, the Axis at the same time with us. What happens to those pilots? They're imprisoned. They're interned. Because, you know, the USSR is like, "Well, we're neutral with respect to Japan, you know, we can't, you know." So actually, like, at the same time as the US is, like, supplying Stalin with all of this stuff, Stalin is imprisoning Americans.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  Right. Again, this is sort of, you know, like, characteristic of this kind of dysfunctional relationship, where you treat her like a princess and she treats you like a slave. Right? You know? And, and so that sort of Wilson-Lennon relationship is duplicated between FDR and Stalin.

• 1:09:53Patrick Bet-David?

  How did Wilson get inspired by Lenin? Like, what hap- what was a single event? Is there an event or no?

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  So, so, American socialism and the American leftism is older than the USSR. You know, and so the idea that basically, this is this kind of Russian-planted seed in our society that, like, can be eliminated by sort of, you know, spraying some kind of pesticide that kills all foreigners or something, is not really accurate. Actually-

• 1:10:22Patrick Bet-David?

  So we inspired Russia more than they inspired us?

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. That's right.

• 1:10:27Patrick Bet-David?

  And where does ROG leftist, progressive, communist- Ideas come from, is it, does it go back down to a single individual?

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  No, no, it's actually a very deep, you know, it's a very deep sort of cultural trope in American history. Let me give you, let me walk through, here's, here's, since you have some nice research on the screen, we can follow along with this. You know, here's, leftism is the real American tradition. America is and always has been a leftist country. I know that this is very difficult for conservatives to accept. It is unfortunately true. So, for example, let's consider Barack Obama. We're going to trace Barack Obama's

• 1:11:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Ideas.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  Or, or ideas and origins back. So, who was Barack Obama's mentor?

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Well, that's a little bit disputed.

• 1:11:18Patrick Bet-David?

  We've hit a couple of names.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  Yes, but you might think of Bill Ayers.

• 1:11:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  And I think that's a very legitimate connection. They were certainly close, arguably before it was said that they were close, you know.

• 1:11:32Patrick Bet-David?

  I would have thought about Frank Marshall Davis.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's his, that's his, probably his dad, actually, who's also, I mean, they look like, if you, if you basically take Frank Marshall Davis and Stanley and Dunham's face and morph them together, it looks like Barack Obama. This is another thing, if I, if, you know, let's, let's go full birther for a moment, can we go full birther?

• 1:11:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Obviously, he was not born in Kenya, that's ridiculous, that would have never happened at this time. What I believe happened was that basically

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  Stanley Dunham's, uh, black, Dunham is also a communist, his black communist pornographer friend knocks up his teenage daughter, and the responses, and this was kind of a normal thing for 1960, the responses, let's find an African exchange student who can pretend to be the real father. Because actually, my black communist pornographer friend knocked up my daughter is not acceptable

• 1:12:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Stop.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  in any way, shape, or form. In 1960. You know, I had a-

• 1:12:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Is that what you're saying happened?

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  That's, I'm pretty sure what happened. Um, and, and that explains just like, it explains a complete lack of a relationship between Barack Obama Senior and Stanley Ann Dunham. It explains Barack Obama's relationship with the guy he calls pop. It explains like, you know, a zillion things. And it's just, it's actually kind of banal. What's actually not banal is that I think they got, um, communists working in the state government in Hawaii to kind of forge the, the, the documentation a little bit, which is why you had that whole foofaraw with the birth certificate, which by the way, we still have not seen.

• 1:13:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Which by the way, I want to tell you some, a crazy story.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Patrick Bet-David?

  My graphic designer in my company, I was in, uh, Woodland Hills, California. You know, Woodland Hills, California. You may know Woodland Hills.

• 1:13:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Diehard Obama guy.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Armenian guy, grew up in Venezuela, liberal family, so he's supporter of it. Remember the day the White House dropped the birth certificate on their website?

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. I do, I do.

• 1:13:34Patrick Bet-David?

  He calls me, he says, can you come into my office?

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  It was photoshopped.

• 1:13:39Patrick Bet-David?

  He says, this is not a- He says, this is not a birth certificate. I said, what do you mean? He says, Pat, let me show you. He gets on there. He says, this is all layered.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Patrick Bet-David?

  So he himself, who's a pro Obama guy-

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  They left the layers in the file.

• 1:13:55Patrick Bet-David?

  They left, they left the layers in the file.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  The layers in the file, right? And, and the thing is actually Barack Obama is perfectly eligible to be president under this theory. Right? You know, he was born to two American parents, Stanley Ann Dunham and Frank Marshall Davis. He was born, absolutely no question in America, probably in Seattle. Uh, and then they basically went for this ridiculous foofaraw to get a black exchange student to pretend to be his father.

• 1:14:21Patrick Bet-David?

  Instead, it was a what? It was a porn?

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  It was Frank Marshall Davis.

• 1:14:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Frank Marshall Davis is Barack Obama's father.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Your opinion?

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  That's my opinion. That's my opinion.

• 1:14:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Who else has that position?

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Uh, you'll see, it's out there on the internet. It's, well, Dreams from My Real Father, I think is the, there's a video on it. Um, you know, it's, you know, it's funny because Obama was visiting, um, when he was president, he was visiting, um, a genomics company in California that I knew the founder of. And I was like, get a glass, get a drinking glass, get a glass, and we'll find this out. Because he doesn't look anything like Barack Obama Senior. Pull up a picture of Barack Obama Senior.

• 1:15:03Speaker 03

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• 1:15:31Speaker 04

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• 1:16:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Nothing.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Nothing like him.

• 1:16:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Nothing.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Let's go back to it. So would it original left?

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  So, okay, we're going back from Barack Obama. You go back to Bill Ayers. Now, Bill Ayers was the head of what organization?

• 1:16:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Which one?

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  The Weather Underground, right? The Weathermen, right?

• 1:17:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Right. So, um, very glamorous, very, you saw this, maybe you saw the, the, uh, the awful, uh, that awful Paul Thomas Anderson film, One Battle After Another, you know?

• 1:17:16Patrick Bet-David?

  I got a lot of movies to watch.

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  You, you don't want to watch.

• 1:17:18Patrick Bet-David?

  I gotta watch, I, I definitely have to watch John Reed, the Red movie with, uh...

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reds, absolutely. No, no, I, you know, um, oh my God, this movie is so, it's like this Antifa glorification movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. Uh, it's like, I wrote a review of it for The Spectator that was like, this may be the worst movie ever made.

• 1:17:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Which one is this? The latest movie that just came out?

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, you can't watch it for the first, it's about illegal immigration or something? Is that the one you're talking about?

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, oh my God.

• 1:17:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, it's called one of his worst movies of all time?

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  It is one of...

• 1:17:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Vinny said he watched it, Rob, the other day. For the first three minutes, he shut it down.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  It may be one of the worst movies of all time.

• 1:17:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Really?

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  It is artistically bad. It is dramatically bad. It is aesthetically bad, uh, and it is morally very bad.

• 1:17:58Patrick Bet-David?

  It's got Sean Penn in it. It's got Benicio del Toro.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the acting, the acting is amazing. I mean, uh, with some exceptions, but, uh, no, so, all right, so you go back to The Weathermen. The Weathermen are glamorous. You hear about them, you know, you're like, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, like, you know, is Bernadine Dorn is hot, right? You know, they're like, they're, they're, these are princelings. These are, you know, um, so, um, and in fact, you know who Bill Ayers' father was?

• 1:18:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  Thomas Ayers, and he was the, uh, CEO of Consolidated Edison.

• 1:18:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  So, this is a rich kid. This is like a, you know, major league rich kid. But let's go back to the Weathermen. So, the Weathermen are a splinter faction of a group called Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, which you've probably heard of. And, um, let's go.

• 1:18:52Patrick Bet-David?

  I've heard of Students for a Democratic Society.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  Okay. Now, SDS is actually the youth wing of an organization which we're gonna get successively cooler names here. We're gonna get some, are you ready for some cooler names?

• 1:19:06Patrick Bet-David?

  I'm moving.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  So, the SDS is originally the youth wing of something called the League for Industrial Democracy.

• 1:19:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Nice. Capitalism and socialism.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  League for Industrial Democracy.

• 1:19:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Great name.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Very cool name. Could be a band, you know. Could be a band. League for Industrial Democracy.

• 1:19:23Patrick Bet-David?

  LID.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  And, uh, and it's basically changes its name from something called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, uh, which you'll see up there. And if you click on the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

• 1:19:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Now, we're in 1905.

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  Now, we're in 1905. No Moscow.

• 1:19:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Czar is still on his throne.

• 1:19:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  The czar is still on his throne. Now, if you look at the founders of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, you'll see some names that, um, you might recognize, like Upton Sinclair.

• 1:19:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  Or Jack London. You've probably heard of Jack London, right? You know, this is again, this is like really deep in the mainstream. This is not, you know, here, Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London. You've heard of all these people, right? These are significant Americans, and this is not coming from the KGB. Okay. So, um, actually, um, you know, these are patrician, these are, these are top-tier Americans, right? So, if you... One of the things I discovered while looking at this is that you can go even farther back with this. Because one of the founders of the ISS is a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  Now, this is not a name you're gonna know. Higginson is chiefly known as the guy who discovered Emily Dickinson. That's his chief claim to fame, it's worthy claim to fame. But he's also, when the ISS is founded, he's like the old guy in the room. You know, you'll go to these young revolutionary things, I'm becoming the old guy in the room, right? You know, all these kids, right, you know, and like, you know, my, my, my audience base is heavily under thirty, right? So you'll, um, because those are, those are the radicals, right, always. So, but there's always like an old guy in the room. So the old guy in the room, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, what's interesting is that he was part of an earlier era. When he was young, he was part of an earlier era of American radicalism.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  He was in fact a financier of terrorism.

• 1:21:25Patrick Bet-David?

  He was.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:42Patrick Bet-David?

  The Secret Six?

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  The Secret Six.

• 1:21:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Alright.

• 1:21:45Speaker 02

  Alright, alright, you know, you're like, is this a real thing? Is this a real thing?

• 1:21:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Who's The Secret Six?

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  Who were The Secret Six?

• 1:21:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Eighteen fifty-nine.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  They were the equivalent of like basically wealthy Saudis who funded Osama.

• 1:22:02Patrick Bet-David?

  What?

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  John Brown. You've heard of John Brown?

• 1:22:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Of course, John Brown, yes.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  John Brown?

• 1:22:08Patrick Bet-David?

  But not the other names that I'm looking at there.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  But like, you know, um, let's see, who are the-

• 1:22:12Patrick Bet-David?

  He looks like an evil guy, look at that.

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  He was a psycho.

• 1:22:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Holy moly.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  He was a complete and total psycho. And so, you know, one of the names of the, of the leading Antifa organizations is? The John Brown Gun Club. So we're really dealing with something you cannot find any living conservative tradition in America with this kind of lineage.

• 1:22:35Patrick Bet-David?

  But if you go back, if I read that, go back to what you just said, it doesn't sound... So, "An evangelical Christian of a strong religious conviction, Brown was profoundly influenced by the Puritan faith of his upbringing. He believed that he was an instrument of God raised to strike the death blow to slavery in the US." That doesn't sound like a bad person. "A sacred obligation." Brown was leading the exponent of violence in the American abolitionist movement, believing it was necessary to unslavery after decades of peaceful efforts.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  So he was previously known for what's called the Potawatomi massacre, where he was in Kansas, where a lot of this trouble was happening, and he just basically, you know, like drags people out of their house with swords and murders them. Not that Harper's Ferry was exactly a success either. And so, you know, he's basically, if you look at the abolitionists in the run-up to the Civil War, they look very, very modern. So if you're looking at the Republicans in the world of Abraham Lincoln, there are actually two very different sort of directions that come together in the Republican Party. There are

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  the abolitionists and the antislavery men. And this sounds like you're describing the same thing, right? In fact, it's totally different. This is why the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, comes so late in the war, and it has to pretend to be a military measure. Because actually, if you went into a bar in Richmond in 1861, and someone asked you to explain the war, and you said, "This war is a holy crusade by the abolitionists north to abolish slavery in the south." They would clap you on the back and buy you another beer. If you said that in Chicago, they'd kick your ass, right? So the antislavery men, the first Republican presidential candidate is John C. Fremont, which a lot of, you know,

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  who also conquered California, so a lot of stuff is named for him. There's a town of Fremont near where I live. Fremont's slogan was "Free men, free soil, Fremont." So if you were a free soiler in the west...

• 1:24:45Patrick Bet-David?

  "Free men, free soil, Fremont."

• 1:24:46Speaker 02

  Yes, very, very catchy. So what "free soil" meant... Was that basically slaves should not be allowed in the territories that were not incorporated as states. And you're like, well, you know, against slavery, we're all against slavery, you're right. You know, actually, the Free Soil Men had a very specific point. They didn't like slavery because they didn't like black people. They were actually, and the abolitionist movement had many tropes of sort of a modern perspective on race, but the antislavery men were hardcore racists. So, for example, Oregon, you might not know this, Oregon, until I believe the 1970s,

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  it was obviously a dead letter, prohibited black people from entering the state of Oregon. 1970, just 50 some years ago. Yeah, yeah, in the 1970s, I forget when it was actually taken out of the Constitution. Oregon was never like, you know, obviously never a Confederate state, there was never any Confederate Oregon. Yeah, you're right. Ban black people from entering the state were part of history long before 1970. Related racist language in the state, I'm a little wrong on the dates, related racist language in the state constitution remained until 2002, right? So, and this is because of basically the antislavery man heritage.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  The Western Republicans were antislavery. The sheik people in Boston were abolitionists. And they managed to form this coalition, which was the coalition of Lincoln. But if you look at the way Puritans and abolitionists thought, very, very, very similar to liberals today. Very similar kind of mindset, similar kind of messianic, you know, and they had all kinds of causes, you know, abolitionism was just one of them. Prohibition was another huge cause of these same people, right? And so you kind of recognize, when you learn to basically, you know, think about Harvard for a moment. In a way, Harvard has been the leading institution in American intellectual life for literally

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  almost 400 years. It was founded in 1636. If you look at basically, what are the ideas of Harvard at? Date D, you are gonna find them running America at date D plus 10 years, D plus 50 years, D plus 100 years, right? And so Harvard was founded as a Puritan institution. Obviously, it was a Puritan college for ministers. Actually, I learned this, I did a debate at Harvard about six months ago with a professor there. And for this, I boned up on the history and I discovered that Harvard is actually somewhat implicated in the Salem witch craze. What did they say when you brought that up? They didn't know anything about it.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  She, she didn't know anything about it. But the, but, you know, so you have this sort of Puritan religion of Harvard that basically you can watch sort of morph over time from like Puritanism into like pure hippism. And it like, there's never a break in that. There's never, no foreign army ever comes and takes over Harvard. Like, it's always sort of this process of a kind of internal becoming, really. And you can see how Puritanism in the 17th century becomes basically American progressive communism in the 20th and even 21st centuries.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  I think the VI, who is basically this boy king who comes after Henry VIII and before Bloody Mary. No, Edward VI, sorry. And...

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  Real brain fart. So, basically, you know, Henry VIII has this, of course, religious revolution where he breaks with Rome for various personal and political reasons. But he's not quite part of the, like, extreme left-wing, and I think you can really use this term at this time, kind of Protestant thing that's going on in Europe. But, of course, he's influenced by this sort of whole Gutenberg Revolution in thinking. And after he dies, his son, who is sickly and young, is basically tutored by these radical Protestants who basically create this kind of proto-Puritan regime in England that lasts

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  only for a few years because Edward VI dies, young, and is replaced by Mary Tudor, who tries to return the country to Catholicism. She also dies somewhat prematurely, and then you have the Elizabethan world. Point is, you can connect, basically, in this sort of continuous ideological and cultural thread, you can go all the way back to 16th century England from Barack Obama. You can connect abolitionists to the Puritans, you can connect the Puritans to the Tudors. And, and like, this is not, you know, this is actually just normal history. It's the way things work, right? It's not particularly crazy.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  But the thing is, if you situate yourself properly in history in this way, you know, you sort of realize that, like, for example, if you're like, a conservative, which you sort of find yourself trying to restore is like, kind of, previous generations of, you know how many, many more people moved from being liberal to conservative than the other direction? And the people who will move in the other direction-

• 1:31:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Every state, plus minus was more red 2024, every county, every state.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  But I'm thinking more of like, of like, yeah, there's that, but I'm thinking more of like intellectuals, like, you know, pundits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You'll see pundits who start off on the left and move over to the right in their lifetime. All over the place, all over history.

• 1:31:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:31:32Speaker 02

  Burke, for example, the like, the idol of American conservatives, he's a liberal in the seventeen seventies. Right?

• 1:31:39Patrick Bet-David?

  But that does kind of make sense.

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  It does kind of make sense.

• 1:31:41Patrick Bet-David?

  You're being brainwashed by the teachers.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  And you're just like getting into like reality.

• 1:31:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, life hasn't happened yet, you haven't paid taxes.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  And then if you look at the people that moved from conservative to liberal, they're really problematic people. They're people with like serious.

• 1:31:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Who are the biggest names, by the way?

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  David Brock.

• 1:31:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Who else?

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  Of Media Matters.

• 1:31:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, Media Matters, he moved from the right to the left.

• 1:32:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, David Brock, David Brock got his start writing hit pieces on Hillary Clinton.

• 1:32:06Patrick Bet-David?

  But what is the profile of people that move from the right to the left?

• 1:32:10Speaker 02

  They're psychopaths.

• 1:32:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Really?

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Tell me why?

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  Because they, they're, they're like,

• 1:32:20Speaker 02

  because to go from left to right is a kind of waking up to reality. But actually, the idea of like reversing that process and putting yourself to sleep and saying, you know, it's like, you know, you know what those people are like, they're like the guy in The Matrix who wants the juicy steak.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  You know, there's a lot of that, basically, in those people. They're like, I'll go with a nice juicy steak, right? I know it's not real, but I'll eat it. And David Brock has had a, you know, pretty impressive career as a left-wing hitman, right? You know, and before that, he had a reasonably impressive career as a right-wing hitman, but he's actually like, you know, just a man completely.

• 1:33:02Patrick Bet-David?

  First time I learned about Media Matters, we had an event. And at this event, we're having Jordan Peterson, Kobe Bryant, Billy Bean, George Bush, this is eight years ago, seven years ago.

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like a different world, doesn't it?

• 1:33:15Patrick Bet-David?

  It's a different world. And then the, the both Bush's team and Kobe said, when we go to events, you're gonna get some hate coming your way. We're like, who's gonna say anything? We're bringing Kobe because his greatness on the, we're bringing, you know, George because president, and we'll bring in Peterson for debate, and then Billy Bean, he's a baseball guy, I like him. Media Matters writes a hit piece on us. And then they reach out to me and they said, look, we just want you to know we're sorry that you're going through this. I'm like, are you guys good with it? Cause I'm good with this. No, we're good with it. We ended up having the best event ever in 2018, 2019. So that's the first time I learned about how good they can be by going out there and do it. But that's interesting to say, when you go from right to left, I wonder how much of it is them being offended?

• 1:34:00Patrick Bet-David?

  I wonder how much of it is, you know, promised a job or a position that the other side didn't do it and say, I'm gonna go to the other side. I wonder what the patterns are because it can't be values.

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not in good faith. Whatever it is, it's not in good faith. It's a, it's just, it's a career move. It's a like, you know, and it's a career move and it often comes out of like a kind of personality disorder. I think, you know, like David Brock's a weird guy, right? You know?

• 1:34:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you pull him up? Can you pull up David Brock?

• 1:34:30Patrick Bet-David?

  You said he's a weird guy?

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  He's a weird guy.

• 1:34:32Patrick Bet-David?

  And he went from a conservative writing hit pieces on Hillary Clinton to going to the other side. Liberal political on Sunday has been, there's no times, most influential operatives in the Democratic Party. There's a, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. Brock began his, a right wing investigative reporter in 1990. He wrote the book Real Anita Hill and uh, uh, Trooper Gate Story. And aligning himself with the Democratic Party, he switched with Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton. He founded Media Matters, a nonprofit organization, the Scrum Progressive.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  Pull up a picture, pull up a, he's a weird, he's a weird looking person.

• 1:35:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, physio, I'm a strong believer in physiotherapy. Is he married? Is he straight?

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  I think he's gay.

• 1:35:12Patrick Bet-David?

  He is?

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, let's look at him. Let's, let's, let's.

• 1:35:16Patrick Bet-David?

  I don't know what he looks like. Go to images.

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

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• 1:35:47Speaker 04

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• 1:36:16Patrick Bet-David?

  That's the look of somebody that would go from the right to the left. You look like that.

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  That's the look. You look like that. You look like a child molester, basically.

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  And, oh, great, now I've made some enemies. But, but, yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's, like, look at those eyes, man, you know? It's like the, you know how, you know how those crazy women in England who, like, slept with a thousand guys in a day or whatever? They have these dead eyes?

• 1:36:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes.

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  And all, like, whores and porn stars have, like, dead eyes? It's horrifying, like...

• 1:36:49Patrick Bet-David?

  He's got dead eyes?

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  He's got dead eyes.

• 1:36:51Patrick Bet-David?

  He looks like the guy from Lawless, the movie. I don't know if you've seen Lawless. It's a fan... That's a movie you gotta watch. I'm making one movie recommendation in return. Because I got 28 movies I gotta go watch after talking to you. But in Lawless, the evil guy, can you pull up Lawless villain? Put Lawless movie villain. Uh, Lawless movie villain. Go to images. He's got, you know, that look. Zoom in. Zoom into that look.

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, he just doesn't care.

• 1:37:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, he's like, he could careless. With the last hour we got together, I want to, I want to talk to you about a couple of things. Especially with the whole time that's going on right now. I'm curious to know what to say about this. One, monarchy, democracy. Let's just case study. I pulled it up and I kind of went up through a couple of different things. When we looked at monarchies and, you know, democracy, the longest lasting democracy was US 238, and you see Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, you know, Luxembourg, Belgium, a couple of these guys. And then when you go up and pull up longest lasting monarchies, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, UK, Morocco, I kind of brought it up a little bit earlier. Why do monarchies outlast democracies?

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  Well, either I would say the question is more, why is monarchy almost the universal form of political organization found throughout history, even in cultures that have no connection with each other? So, for example, when the conquistadors, who are working for a monarchy, come to South America, they find the Aztecs, they find the Incas. They don't find any hippie tribes. Nobody's ever found any hippie tribes. And, you know, the, well, there's one interesting exception, actually. But they basically find, you know, if you go back all the way to the chimpanzee, you

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  will find that our ancestors for many, many millions of years have been living in small groups with individual leaders. Chimpanzees, you know, have kings. They sometimes have a little triumvirate or whatever, but that's not really stable. They have, you know, chimp kings, actually. And being the chimp king is definitely the way to pass your genes on as a chimpanzee. They make war. People were very surprised to find, you know, these things. And, you know, everyone in the 1960s and 70s wanted to believe that we were descended from, you know, millions of years of hippies. And it was a big shock to find that even chimpanzees make war, and they make war in a very, very ugly way. Right?

• 1:39:21Speaker 02

  So you have this sort of, this form, which is really the universal form of human governance historically. But it's more than the universal form historically. It's also, when you look at basically any effective organization, whether that's a company, whether it's a military, whether it's a movie, you've probably heard of the auteur theory of movies, you know? Imagine a film directed by a committee. You're just like, you know?

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  Even in a restaurant, you have a chef, right? And so this structure of basically, you know, the sort of the pyramid-shaped command structure is something that recurs over and over again in human affairs. And if there was a way to build more effective organizations than a structure shaped like this, somebody would have found it. And so actually, if you want to get anything done, you have a monarchy. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, essentially, we see that structures other than monarchies, and of course, democracy is a very tricky word because just because it calls itself that doesn't mean it's that.

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  But fundamentally, you know, what you're seeing, whether something is a democracy or an oligarchy, is you're seeing a lot of division of power. And you don't see that ever in a functional company, for example, because a company is not going to survive that. Imagine if Apple had checks and balances and maybe a Supreme Court that decided if its software wasn't buggy and the users of Apple products voted on the next feature and maybe had an Apple Congress of all the engineers or something, right? You know, there's no way you could build an iPhone in this way, right?

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  There's also no way that, you know, the Department of Transportation could build a Tesla, right? These are just organizations that have much, much, much lower effectiveness structures. They're bureaucracies, they're bottom-up systems, they're process-oriented, that's, you know, like the paperwork just multiplies infinitely until you really just can't build a railroad from SF to LA. And...

• 1:41:49Speaker 02

  You know, you just, you look at systems that are organized monarchically, and you're just like, this is like, not just twice as effective, this is ten times as effective, this is a hundred times as effective. And we happen to be competing with this country, China, which is very much a monarchy, which has this very interesting history where its monarchy was really founded by this, it's almost a worst-case scenario, this psychopath Mao. He's really, Mao is just not a, he was a crazy dude, right? And one of the things that Mao did, coming out of this revolutionary communist, you know, world that he was in, he did the same thing that Stalin did,

• 1:42:33Speaker 02

  which is that he killed everyone in the party who threatened him. And so we established this incredible level of like monarchy, you know, in China, not of course a monarchy in name, but you know, the rule of one person in China. He was a psycho, millions of people, maybe tens of millions of people died, and then Mao dies. Mao dies, and there's a struggle for power, and he's created this incredible monarchy, and this monarchy is taken over by Deng Xiaoping. And Deng Xiaoping is actually capable, is actually like, you know, all of the leaders of China since Mao were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. Xi Jinping had a horrible experience, like his sister was killed, right? You know, and so all of these guys, like, they're competent guys,

• 1:43:18Speaker 02

  they're done with any of this Mao shit, and they just wanna rule their country. And so Deng Xiaoping takes China as a monarchy, and his successors take China from this like backwater, third-world country. You know one fact about China that most people don't know? Like, if you go to China, you can't drink the water. Everything is crazy modern, you go to the subway, it's beautiful, it's gleaming, whatever, you can't drink the water, because it still has the DNA of a third-world country, because nobody expected to be able to drink the water in China, so nobody bothered fixing it. So actually, you can't drink the water, right? But everything else is just gleaming, whatever, you know, they're killing us. They're actually, they're destroying our country. They're literally killing us because they're beating us, right?

• 1:44:01Patrick Bet-David?

  China's beating us.

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  China's beating us, China's beating us. There's only a few technical areas where we still have a lead on China. China is beating us like a dog.

• 1:44:10Patrick Bet-David?

  In what areas, in what areas?

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  What in this room was not made in China? I mean, literally, what in this room was not made in China? Right? That screen was made in China. That screen was made in China. Everything was made in China. So, I mean, like, basically, like, in terms of... And if you go from, you know, the train station in the metro in Shanghai to the metro in New York, you will feel like you have just traveled to a third world country. You go from Dubai to JFK and you're like, you've traveled through a third world country. And then you go from JFK to, say, Sao Paulo and you're like, oh yeah, another step down. Right? That's basically how bad it is. And there are a few technical areas.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  There's like reusable rockets and deep ultraviolet lithography and, you know, a couple of the things where the US is still ahead of China. But they are beating us and they have put us in the same position that we were in with respect to the USSR, where everybody in the USSR could basically look at American gadgets, American stuff and basically...

• 1:45:21Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you call China, though? China, China wouldn't be... What would China be considered to you?

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  Oh, it's a monarchy.

• 1:45:26Patrick Bet-David?

  What would Russia be considered to you?

• 1:45:28Speaker 02

  Russia is also a monarchy. Now, these are monarchies where, you know, they haven't established, like, China... China is a monarchy, you know...

• 1:45:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Define a monarchy in your eyes. What is a monarchy?

• 1:45:38Speaker 02

  The rule of one.

• 1:45:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Rule of one.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  The literal...

• 1:45:40Patrick Bet-David?

  This is the whole Aristotle, one, two, many.

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  Yes, literally the rule of one.

• 1:45:44Patrick Bet-David?

  We are the third one under Aristotle's ideas? Is that what you're saying?

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  We're an oligarchy. We're an oligarchy.

• 1:45:48Patrick Bet-David?

  We're an oligarchy.

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  We're an oligarchy.

• 1:45:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  And, and so if you, if you were in oligarchy that, you know, Trump would like us to be a democracy, but we're still an oligarchy. And you're reminded of that every time a judge overrules him. And the, the... But in China, China's a monarchy. It's not a hereditary monarchy. Now, a lot of people in the, you know, it's a sort of... It's more like a theocracy. It's an institutional monarchy. And the rules for choosing the next leader are very strange and opaque. And we don't really know what happens when Xi Jinping... We don't really know what happens when Putin dies. Nobody has any idea what happens when Putin dies.

• 1:46:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Isn't that a?

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  That's a flaw.

• 1:46:28Patrick Bet-David?

  That's a flaw in the monarchy.

• 1:46:29Speaker 02

  That's a flaw, that's a flaw. And so what you're seeing is basically, because these monarchies have to pretend to be something else. You know, you'll have these like dictators and the dictator is like, you know, even in the Roman Empire, they never used the word king. They were just like, oh, I'm just the first citizen, you know? That's the origin of the word prince. The first citizen. Oh, you're the first citizen. No, you're the frickin' king. Right? But they never used the Roman word rex, which means king, in the Roman Empire. Imperator just means commander. So, and they had, and this chaotic succession system basically broke down in the Roman Empire.

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  So in the Roman Empire, you have what's called, you know, first of all, Caesar and Augustus are absolutely great. They're successors, so forth. And then you have this period of what's called the five good emperors from, Marcus Aurelius is the last and the first is Trajan, I think, Trajan or Hadrian. You know, this is like a period of over a hundred years where Edward Gibbon is like, this is the best government, you know, humanity has ever seen. Right? And they adopted their successors, so it was a little more like the Chinese system in some ways. But when you have what's called in the 20th century a dictatorship, it's sort of a monarchy

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  that's struggling to be born and often struggling to be born under very, very chaotic circumstances. So Napoleon, for example, does this. Napoleon is a leftist general in, you know, Reign of Terror era France and becomes, first they're LARPing Rome, so he's like the first consul and he's like, screw it, I'm gonna make myself emperor. And he makes himself emperor. Right? And he intended to pass on that role to his, to his family and he used his family a lot, but in the end, of course, it didn't work out. You know, Hitler is kind of a shit tier Napoleon in some ways. And he never had a family. Hitler was probably gay, I think.

• 1:48:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Hitler's probably gay?

• 1:48:32Speaker 02

  Hitler was probably gay. So, look, same thing about Obama. If you see a guy who is a highly charismatic world leader and he is not surrounded by flocks of women at all times?

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  What's, what would you guess? Right, you know, um, you know about the Obama gay thing, I assume?

• 1:48:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ever seen, ever seen a video of Hitler doing a Hitler salute? He's like...

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  He's so, your gaydar goes off. You're just, you're looking at Hitler and you're like, "That's Hitler?" And like, if you have any kind of gaydar at all and you're watching Hitler, you're like, "That is a gay man."

• 1:49:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow, you're saying Hitler is gay?

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, but if you see the videos... Oh, yeah, this is, uh, there's a thesis, there's a very well-written book by a German historian called The Hidden Hitler that makes this point like really, really strongly. Like, he's hanging out in the men's hostel in Vienna, which was a, you know, um, uh, yeah, that one. Um, which is a, like a gay prostitution site. I don't think he wanted to be gay. He wasn't like a believer in like gay ideology.

• 1:49:41Patrick Bet-David?

  So he got recruited.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:49:42Patrick Bet-David?

  He got recruited.

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know how he became gay. But, uh, you know, but I, I, I think he really wanted Eva Braun to really be his wife, but he was basically attracted to men. Um, and, um, you know, as to what's going on with Barack Obama.

• 1:49:57Patrick Bet-David?

  If you would've said today, "You're gonna tell me gay and, you know, Hitler and Obama have the, are both gay."

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think so.

• 1:50:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Both of them, that would be an interesting...

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  Okay. I think so, but, uh, you know, that's, uh, they obviously are, you know, very different in many other ways. So, so, you know, going, going back to the question...

• 1:50:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Monarchy democracy.

• 1:50:15Speaker 02

  Monarchy oligarchy democracy.

• 1:50:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes.

• 1:50:18Speaker 02

  And the thing is that everyone basically looks, and, and this is, I think, the crucial point here, you know, for Americans, because they basically look at this oligarchy, which is pretending to be a democracy. And they're like, "This is just a lie." And they can tell that this is a lie. They can say, "Hey, this is this other thing that's pretending to be this thing." You know, basically, the way the deep state works is the deep state, you know, is the administrative state, the executive, you know, uh, branch nominally. But the so-called executive branch is actually run by Congress. It is run by the legislative branch. The legislative branch controls its budget down to very small micro-budgeting levels.

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  It controls its policy and most of all, it controls its personnel. As you know, you can't fire these people. Imagine being the CEO, but you can't fire these people. Imagine you're the CEO of this podcast, but you can't fire the people who work for you. What? Right? That makes no sense. Right? It's not actually an executive branch. We actually don't have an executive branch. We have a legislative branch. And moreover, the thing about this legislative branch is that it's controlled by Congress. Now, Congress ostensibly is democratically elected. We do have these elections. Almost nobody cares about congressional elections. The popularity rating of Congress, I think it might be over 30% now. This is very unusual. What's the...

• 1:51:44Patrick Bet-David?

  It hit 27. I don't know what it is now, but I know when it was as low as 27.

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  Oh, no. It's been as low as... It's been as low as 12. It gets as...

• 1:51:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, you gotta be kidding me.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:51:53Patrick Bet-David?

  What's the popularity of Congress right now, Rob?

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  It could be up in the 30s. That's very high.

• 1:51:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Really? I thought it was 27, but maybe it is 30s today.

• 1:52:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Approval rating of Congress. What is it?

• 1:52:09Speaker 02

  14.

• 1:52:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Gallup?

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  Oh, it's up to 17. So, right, you know...

• 1:52:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  This is... And this is the organ... So...

• 1:52:20Patrick Bet-David?

  What was the highest, go to the highest point popularity? 2009...

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  That's on the line 11.

• 1:52:26Patrick Bet-David?

  84. Wow.

• 1:52:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. That's a weird... You know, but like, the thing is 17%, right? So, here's how you keep the system from, you know, being an oligarchy rather than a democracy. It's really very easy. You basically run the whole executive branch procedurally according to what is called sort of laws that are passed by Congress, which are actually like micromanagement bills as, you know, thick as 10 phone books stacked on top of each other, which almost no congressman read. Then you have an electoral system where if you run for... If you're an incumbent running for the House of Representatives, your chance of being reelected is roughly 98%.

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  So like in, you know, in the Senate, it's a little lower, it's more like 90%. However, if you get unelected, very sad. Whoever replaces you has no power at all because of the seniority system. Which, by the way, is found nowhere in the Constitution. And so if you managed to unelect, like they unelected, who did they unelect? And this guy Dave Brat unelected a guy in Virginia a few years ago. You know, you unelect one of these dinosaurs, like a Mitch McConnell or whatever.

• 1:53:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Good luck.

• 1:53:42Speaker 02

  His place is Eric Cantor, yeah. Eric Cantor, one of the classic GOP guys. His place is immediately taken by one of his fellows and you don't get his job. Because actually, the whole thing is run on the seniority system. And so actually, like, you know, one way to test whether a political system or a political power, political structure has become symbolic is to say, if we remove this structure, can the system work in the same way? So for example, you know, if you remove Charles III from England, will daily life on the streets of England change at all? No, because he's not involved in government whatsoever. Right, uh, you know, if you-

• 1:54:27Patrick Bet-David?

  But you want the monarchy to have influence. You don't want a king that does not have influence, that's just a figurehead.

• 1:54:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a fake king.

• 1:54:35Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not a fan of the figurehead model.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

  No, I'm not a fan of the figurehead.

• 1:54:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Because you think America is a figurehead.

• 1:54:39Speaker 02

  I think that actually, democracy has entered the figurehead model. And so essentially, when you get, so-

• 1:54:45Patrick Bet-David?

  People would disagree with you on Trump, though, for Trump to be a figurehead. He's getting a lot of things done as a-

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  Again, 0.001%, right? Remember what-

• 1:54:53Patrick Bet-David?

  100 is still more alive.

• 1:54:54Speaker 02

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

• 1:55:30Patrick Bet-David?

  You're gonna keep going backwards.

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

  Sorry?

• 1:55:33Patrick Bet-David?

  You're gonna keep going backwards. There is no progress.

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 1:55:36Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you make progress with that if you have the system that we have?

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  You actually have to enter a completely, yeah, you have to multiply.

• 1:55:43Patrick Bet-David?

  It's gonna be nasty.

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

  You have to, no, it doesn't have to be nasty. And that's, I think, the most important thing is that actually you can get up to those higher levels of power without it being nasty. If you look at, for example, the fall of East Germany, almost complete change of power. It's not quite Germany in 1945. It's pretty close.

• 1:56:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, but somebody from the West got up and said, tear down that wall. So there was another powerful figure that was pushing you. So who can do that to America, though?

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Nobody's there.

• 1:56:14Speaker 02

  No, that's true. That's true. That's true. It's a different situation.

• 1:56:17Patrick Bet-David?

  If I may, let me say this, because I want to go to the Iran situation to see, because, you know, you've commented on Iran as well.

• 1:56:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so I think about democracy, monarchy, and the, like, when I'm processing and watching what you're saying in other interviews, and then I'm saying, I'm asking questions. Okay, what is the benefit? Sell monarchy. Monarchy to me is 75% by birth, 25% by sword. So 25% by sword, and it says the last time somebody replaced the king by sword was 1689. Since then, it's been pretty much by birth. Okay, of the 75%, that's by birth, there is no competition in a monarchy.

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  But you're not including dictators in that set.

• 1:56:56Patrick Bet-David?

  I'm not putting dictators.

• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  And so if you look at, if you look at, say...

• 1:57:00Patrick Bet-David?

  But if you let me make the point, so where I'm going with this is the monarchy side, if it's by birth, there is no competition. It's the oldest son. It used to be 50% oldest son in the 1600s. Then it went to 60%. Today, it's about 80% is the oldest son that replaces the king. So 30 years in advance, I know who's gonna be my king, so it's not like I'm gonna go run and campaign. And then it says monarchies make more long-term decisions with that than in America, in a democracy, you may offer anything to get elected because it's a four-year election cycle. But then at least in a democracy, you have more freedom, more... In a monarchy, you can be, you can get a good leader, good king, and then all of a sudden, the next guy comes up and holy shit, this guy's a,

• 1:57:44Patrick Bet-David?

  you know, dictator, control, doesn't want you to say anything, you lose your freedom of speech, you lose your freedom of innovation, he has, you have to listen to certain things, maybe, maybe because he had a big following up with his father, and he hates his father, and my father's an evil man, I'm gonna do everything different than my father, cuz he didn't respect me enough, and didn't, we've seen these stories, right, that you go through.

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  Oh, sure, so, so monarchies, monarchies have a lot of, have a lot of failure modes, right, and historical monarchies have a lot of different kinds of failure modes, you can have a king who's the oldest son, and he's mentally retarded, right, you know, Charles the Second,

• 1:58:19Patrick Bet-David?

  It's gonna be a tough king.

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  Charles the Second, Charles the Second of Spain, right, you know.

• 1:58:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Charles the Second of Spain was a king, and he was mentally retarded?

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was like, there was too much inbreeding going on, um, and, um, the, uh, yeah, so, you know, when you have, when you have, or Henry the Sixth of England, you know, also, uh,

• 1:58:39Patrick Bet-David?

  That guy's name is Charles?

• 1:58:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, Carlos.

• 1:58:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Not Carlita?

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  No, no, that's different.

• 1:58:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Carlos.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  Carlos.

• 1:58:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, he looks like a Carlita.

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

  And, uh, yeah, no, he was, he was, it was too much inbreeding.

• 1:58:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 1:58:51Speaker 02

  You know, and,

• 1:58:52Patrick Bet-David?

  It's not working out too well for him.

• 1:58:54Speaker 02

  Look at him, look at him, the face is just, something's wrong with that guy, right, so, so the thing is that, that, you know, historically, there's a lot of different systems of finding a single leader, now, for me, actually, two things, one is that

• 1:59:13Speaker 02

  some of the problems that were caused by biological inheritance in the past don't exist anymore, because it's actually with modern IVF, you know, Henry the Eighth doesn't have this problem of, I need to marry eight women to find someone who's gonna give me a son, and not succeed in that, you know, you can have a couple hundred, right, uh, the Ottomans did this thing where it wasn't the oldest son, oh no, actually, uh, it was all the sons of the, of the last Sultan, and he had a harem, so he had a lot of sons, and they basically fought it out to be who's the next Sultan.

• 1:59:53Patrick Bet-David?

  That's not gonna work today.

• 1:59:53Speaker 02

  And the others were strangled with the silk and bows, right? Yeah. Right? You know, that's not gonna work today. There's a lot of things that are sort of like not gonna work today. What we have that works today, that's sort of, you know, in a way, the inspiration is, you know, this feeling that basically as soon as you get into the private sector, suddenly just like everything works like magic. You're just like, wow, you know, the California Department of Transportation could never build an electric car, but Elon Musk can build an electric car. Okay, you're obviously, you're looking at monarchy there, right? And you're looking at the sort of superiority of a monarchical structural organization.

• 2:00:30Patrick Bet-David?

  He is still held accountable by the government, though.

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  He is held accountable. So he's held accountable in two ways, actually. He's held accountable by

• 2:00:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Shareholders?

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  The government who's above him, and he's also held accountable by corporate governance, which is shareholders and a board of directors. Now, if you, so, so there are sort of things you can learn from that at a sovereign level, but definitely at a sovereign level, you don't have a government over the government, right? You're, you're really at the top.

• 2:00:59Patrick Bet-David?

  That's what I'm saying. So, so the question then the average person may ask is what would Elon do if he knew he had zero regulatory guidelines to be dealing with today? What would Elon be doing today?

• 2:01:11Speaker 02

  So I think that actually Elon would not be doing anything that's super different from what he's doing. But this sort of bears, you know, this sort of comes, kind of comes into one of the factors in the way Americans think about governance, where they're basically, you remember I said earlier that there's this kind of schizophrenia where Americans think they have an absolutely terrible government and the best system of government anywhere. So one of the things when you're in any sort of terrible situation, one of the things that is often causing you to be trapped in a terrible situation is this little principle called the perfect is the enemy of the good. And you're basically like, here, we're in this terrible situation.

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  How do I get to a perfect situation? You've probably known many people in many ways who've been paralyzed and trapped.

• 2:02:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Many.

• 2:02:02Speaker 02

  By the how do we get to the perfect situation? And so.

• 2:02:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Those types of people don't make it in business.

• 2:02:07Speaker 02

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

• 2:02:52Speaker 02

  Some of these memes are true, some of these memes are obviously false, some of them, I can't really tell. It is just a giant polluted river of information. And you basically say, from the perspective of someone who, of a blue stater who believes in meritocracy, you would basically say, wow, I'm going to put this sewer in charge of virology? Like, it's like the, you know, the cartoon of the guy who wants to fly the plane, right? No, I'm sorry.

• 2:03:20Patrick Bet-David?

  That cartoon is fascinating, by the way.

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that cartoon is.

• 2:03:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Rob, can you send that cartoon to me? Please continue.

• 2:03:24Speaker 02

  And, and, and, and so, you know, you look at this from the perspective of like, blue state America, and you're just like, oh my God, like, you're really, we're going to have this highly detailed, technical, scientific thing, and it's going to be run by who has the best rumor in Facebook moms? Like, no, this is ridiculous. This is an absurd way to run a railroad. And of course, they're completely right about that. And then populists will look at this and be like, uh, all right. Uh, it sounds reasonable that we will have virologists run virology. But you know what happens if we have virologists run virology? They invent COVID. And in fact, if you look at basically the story of how COVID was invented,

• 2:04:06Speaker 02

  uh, it looks like, uh, it's something that would be done by a mad scientist. Like, an evil mad scientist would be like, oh, yes, we're gonna go into the, you know, wow, there was this one pandemic, SARS one, that looked really dangerous. So, wow, we could get some dangerous viruses here. I'm a mad scientist. I'm gonna get some dangerous viruses. So we're gonna go to all the bat ca- bat caves in southern China, Laos, and we're gonna collect all the bat coronaviruses.

• 2:04:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think Xi knew about it?

• 2:04:32Speaker 02

  No, no, it was not actually. This is the crazy thing. This was actually just a normal process. They didn't, like-

• 2:04:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think Fauci knew about it?

• 2:04:42Speaker 02

  He knew about it in the sense of, here, let me, let me, let's, I, I think it's worth going longer into the, you know, interpretation of COVID. You notice that one of the things that nobody talked about in the 2024 election was COVID. It was not a political issue at all. It's insane.

• 2:04:59Patrick Bet-David?

  What, what, why do you think?

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Because it's too big to handle. We actually couldn't fit it on stage. And like, and here's the reason why it was too big to handle. So, you know, you basically have all these COVID myths, these populist COVID myths going around, you know.

• 2:05:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it because it's too big to handle or because the left would have looked bad? Cause-

• 2:05:16Speaker 02

  Both. It's the same thing. So, not only would the left have looked, COVID was an American Chernobyl. COVID was an American Chernobyl, except it killed like, you know, uh, a thousand times as many people. Right? Because it wasn't, you know, early COVID was a nasty virus. You did not want to get early COVID.

• 2:05:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, I got it. I was down for 21 days.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:35Patrick Bet-David?

  I lost 25 pounds.

• 2:05:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was brutal. It was brutal. Uh, as soon as Omicron came out, that should have been the end of it. Actually, there's a, there's another conspiracy theory that Omicron was actually a vaccine.

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  Because when Omicron appears, Omicron's great, saved my life. When I got Omicron, I was like, oh my god.

• 2:05:52Patrick Bet-David?

  You got Omicron?

• 2:05:53Speaker 02

  I got Omicron.

• 2:05:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, what was the third one?

• 2:05:55Speaker 02

  Delta was nasty, Delta was before Omicron, Delta was nasty. Omicron comes out and has two things about Omicron. One is that it's descended from a strain of virus that hasn't been seen in the wild for like six months to a year. Okay, where was it? It wasn't in the wild, it was in the lab. Secondly, it has signs of being adapted to rodents. Maybe it was hanging out in sewer rats, I don't know. Maybe it was hanging out in a frickin' lab. Maybe it was actually, someday we will find out that it was actually a good mad scientist who invented Omicron and saved us from this garbage. But to get back to the invention of COVID, here's what happened. And I think this basically says a lot about the way our political system, the way this

• 2:06:39Speaker 02

  like meritocracy works. So if you want to be a scientist, I'm in a way a scientist.

• 2:06:46Patrick Bet-David?

  May I ask you why your eyes?

• 2:06:49Speaker 02

  It's just, it's like, it's so fucking dramatic. It's just like-

• 2:06:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you getting emotional truly?

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:55Patrick Bet-David?

  This has happened four times in the interview already.

• 2:06:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 2:06:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's just like an incredible fucking story. Because let me tell you the true story of COVID. Okay, the true story of COVID was this is the way our country is governed. So you're a scientist, okay? You probably know a lot of scientists, you know, I dropped out of a PhD program myself. How do you work as a scientist? You're a bureaucrat, you're writing grant proposals, okay? What does your grant proposal say? This is important, the government should fund it, this is important. Here's what happened with COVID. SARS-1 happens.

• 2:07:32Speaker 02

  It's absolutely what it's purported to be. It's a bat virus that gets loose. You ever see the film Contagion?

• 2:07:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Of course, of course. Matt Damon is in, is it Matt Damon?

• 2:07:41Speaker 02

  I think it's Matt Damon. You know, the technical advisor for Contagion was one of the coronavirus crew. And the virus in Contagion actually is a bat coronavirus. And so-

• 2:07:52Patrick Bet-David?

  That movie was going viral the first week of COVID, second week of COVID. March, April, whatever it was.

• 2:07:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was in, I watched it with my late wife when COVID started. And if you, if you look at-

• 2:08:08Speaker 02

  So SARS-1 happens, clearly a real problem. If you're a virologist, you go after real problems because real problems get you grants, right? The problem of bat coronaviruses mutating to become viruses that affect humans, a zoonosis, that's a real thing. Bam. Researchers converge on this like crazy and they're like, you know, but what are we going to research exactly? Well, we're going to research the possibility that bat coronaviruses will mutate to infect humans. Of course, they're bad viruses, they don't naturally infect humans, but when we find one that comes close, ooh, it's a big surprise. And how are they going to mutate?

• 2:08:50Speaker 02

  Well, you know, mutations happen randomly in nature, you know, how do we predict? That was one of the names of one of the study programs. How do we predict what mutations could happen in future to make SARS happen again? Well, we'll make them ourselves. And so you basically got this research program, which is completely normal science. This was not a Chinese program, this was an American research program, mainly run out at the University of North Carolina by this guy Ralph Baric and the, Peter Daszak is the kind of the big grant coordinator for all this stuff. Um, you know, still walking around free as a bird. And they basically have all of these bureaucratic incentives to act like mad scientists.

• 2:09:33Speaker 02

  They basically have, because if you can take a bat coronavirus and mutate it to become dangerous, that's a paper. The paper says bat coronaviruses are dangerous, please give us more money. This treadmill is still going on, right? And in fact, the guy who replaced Fauci, I think his name is Eichelberger, as the head of American virology, Fauci has the remarkable distinction of being the guy who supervised this research, then covered it up and was in charge of the response to it. Truly insane episode. And immunized, pretty much hardened, so you can't touch them. I think they could, but they're not, they're not going to. They're not, they're not going to try to prosecute this stuff. Why do you say that?

• 2:10:17Speaker 02

  Because that's what I've heard from people who were involved. Why though? Because both sides are implicated? Because, no, because they just don't.

• 2:10:27Speaker 02

  That gets more into sort of what the mission of the Republican world and Washington sees itself as doing. They are basically, they're more like, what would be the point? And I'm like, I can tell you what the point is, but like, they're more like, what would be the point? But let me finish my story because it's a great twist.

• 2:10:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Please.

• 2:10:45Speaker 02

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

• 2:11:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, of course, with Stephen Colbert.

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the best thing, it's the best thing Stewart ever did.

• 2:11:07Patrick Bet-David?

  We can't talk about it.

• 2:11:08Speaker 02

  It's the best thing Stewart ever did.

• 2:11:09Patrick Bet-David?

  And he was the first guy on the left who did that, and Colbert was uncomfortable.

• 2:11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, and he just, he destroyed that, right? You know, and like, you're just like, God, this guy's talented, right? And, you know, the pangolin, kiss the, kiss the bat, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. Right, you know, so, anyway, this guy's out. And Eichelberger is the new head of American virology. I think that's his name, is in. And Eichelberger's claim to fame, he hadn't worked on bat coronaviruses at all. His claim to fame, his mad scientist, you gotta be in the head of the mad scientist. Imagine you're a mad scientist, or you want to be a mad scientist.

• 2:11:51Speaker 02

  And, he's the, he's at Eichelberger's, the head of, is the Fauci's replacement. If you want to be a mad scientist, you're in the shower, you're having mad scientist, you know, realizations. Right, and this mad scientist in the shower is like, I can recreate the 1918 flu. How are you gonna recreate the 1918 flu? He's like, well, the 1918 flu spread all around the world, killed 20 million people, whatever, whatever, and it infected Alaska. And in Alaska, they have permafrost.

• 2:12:29Speaker 02

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

• 2:12:53Patrick Bet-David?

  This is who again?

• 2:12:54Speaker 02

  I think it's Jay Eichelberger or something like that. It's Fauci's replacement. If you.

• 2:13:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Who is Fauci's replacement? I'm really curious about this guy now. I'm seeing Hugh.

• 2:13:06Speaker 02

  He's the head of.

• 2:13:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Akin Claus.

• 2:13:08Speaker 02

  No, no, that was Fauci's aide.

• 2:13:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Gene Marazo.

• 2:13:11Speaker 02

  No, those are all.

• 2:13:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Jeffrey Taubenberger.

• 2:13:17Speaker 02

  Taubenberger.

• 2:13:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, Taubenberger.

• 2:13:18Speaker 02

  Sorry. Led you.

• 2:13:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Jeffrey Taubenberger.

• 2:14:22Speaker 02

  I knew I had it wrong.

• 2:14:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Who gave him the job? Who appointed him?

• 2:14:25Speaker 02

  Uh, Trump. He's a Trump appointee. And if you, uh, um, he was the first to sequence the genome of the influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu. And he published that genome, which means that anyone who can basically print DNA can have themselves a nice new Spanish flu. Right? And so, when you basically ask to sort of pull back for a minute, why can't we get the mad scientists out of virology? Why do virologists insist on basically behaving as if their job was to invent dangerous viruses, as though they were mad scientists?

• 2:14:58Patrick Bet-David?

  So you would categorize him as a mad scientist?

• 2:15:01Speaker 02

  Well, the thing is, no, actually, he's a totally banal, normal scientist. And, and, and what's crazy, what's really important about this regime of experts, is the way in which sort of normal people become, by doing normal things, become mad scientists. Because what you're really looking at here with virology, and we'll relate this back to foreign policy in a moment, what you're really looking at here with, with gain-of-function research in virology, is a conflict of interest. Because when you have a conflict of interest, you have the nominal interest of some person or organization, and you have their actual interest.

• 2:15:42Speaker 02

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

• 2:15:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Hmm.

• 2:15:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:59Patrick Bet-David?

  That makes sense.

• 2:16:00Speaker 02

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

• 2:16:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Can we, can?

• 2:16:20Speaker 02

  So the incentive, basically, is making them mad scientists. And that's sort of the, the structural problem.

• 2:16:25Patrick Bet-David?

  I totally see that.

• 2:16:26Speaker 02

  And when populists look... You know, when populists look at Washington, they don't have this kind of intricate incentive based theory, but they're like, something is really wrong there, right? You know, and like, when they look at the lab leak, they're just like, you know, it's like, I think what Peter Thiel once said about, you know, Trump, which was that he was sort of, you should take him seriously, but not literally, right? And, and that's sort of true of like populism in general. Populism sees this thing and it's like, you know, let's take the cartoon with the airplane. Like, suppose you're in, remember that airline that flew out over the, you know, Indian Ocean and disappeared, you know? If you're in MH370, yeah, you stand up and take control of the cockpit.

• 2:17:09Speaker 02

  Because that, that plane is going nowhere good, right? And when you see the way this sort of system of the rule of institutions and experts has developed all of these conflicts of interest, you know, so let's go to foreign policy, for example, you're like, expanding NATO to the east. Okay, what is expanding NATO to the east? It's gain-of-function diplomacy. Actually, no one can point to a reason why expanding NATO to the east was a good idea. Many prominent experts warn against it. George Kennan is like, don't do this. William Burns, the CIA head, is like, don't do this. We tell the Russians, we're not going to do this. We make them informal promises that we're not going to do this. Then we do it anyway. What the hell are they supposed to think?

• 2:17:54Speaker 02

  Right? You know, and it's like this compulsion, this sort of bureaucratic compulsion that can't be stopped, that has no, you know, possible bearing on the security of Fort Lauderdale, you know? And it just like, and it's this, you know, the self-licking ice cream cone, and it's a toxic self-licking ice cream cone. It like, basically like, I mean, is, you know, COVID kills 20 million people, how many people is the Ukraine war killed? 500,000?

• 2:18:26Patrick Bet-David?

  That was one of the things that I really wanted to know. I really, if there's one of the things that was in my top five that I wanted to know what happened was that because I think it would be a certain accountability for China as well with the recklessness, even though you're saying Xi wasn't involved. But let's wrap up with this current event, Iran. What's going on there? Okay?

• 2:18:42Speaker 02

  What's going on there?

• 2:18:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Your thoughts? What will happen? What should happen?

• 2:18:46Speaker 02

  Uh, wow. I think that unfortunately, the current thing in Iran is gonna get a lot of protesters killed and not accomplish anything. I think that when a regime falls, protests don't bring about an end to a regime. When a regime falls, it's because it's lost confidence in itself and it no longer believes in itself. And I don't think the Ayatollahs are at that point yet.

• 2:19:12Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't think they are?

• 2:19:13Speaker 02

  I don't think they are.

• 2:19:14Patrick Bet-David?

  You think they will be this year, 2026?

• 2:19:17Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:19:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Or you're thinking it's a longer five, 10?

• 2:19:19Speaker 02

  It's a very random, it's a very random thing, but it still feels to me like clearly the fanaticism of 1979 is not there anymore. Like, a lot of that energy is, like, the energy of Iran in the 80s is just demented, completely crazy. And by the way, if you don't know this, this is another thing where overthrowing the Shah was basically the dream of progressives everywhere for like...

• 2:19:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Of course.

• 2:19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Of course.

• 2:19:46Speaker 02

  Most Americans don't.

• 2:19:46Patrick Bet-David?

  And Carter, Carter could have been involved. He didn't help him out. He promised he would. He didn't.

• 2:19:50Speaker 02

  Oh, no. Carter orchestrated getting rid of him. I mean, you know, and like, the, the, this is just like, like, this is a, this is progressive diplomacy in the 70s.

• 2:20:02Patrick Bet-David?

  So how do you process interventionist versus non-interventionist?

• 2:20:05Speaker 02

  So...

• 2:20:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it 100% never don't intervene, or does it make sense at times? How do you process that?

• 2:20:10Speaker 02

  I would say that, you know, the rules of like statecraft and diplomacy have not changed at all in this world. You know, whatever we say they are, is what they are. The problem is that basically, as Clint Eastwood put it, man's gotta know his limitations. And, you know, why we had Afghanistan, why we had Vietnam, is that we did not know our limitations. We did not understand how essentially bad we are at basically doing nation-building, doing colonialism. Like, we sort of intentionally suck at it. These are very solvable problems,

• 2:20:51Speaker 02

  but like, we are not in a condition to solve these problems. One of the interesting things about the Venezuela intervention, I'm basically an isolationist. I think that the US should essentially abandon its empire. And, you know, but I have an open mind. And one of the things that was impressive about the Venezuela intervention...

• 2:21:13Speaker 02

  Was that it was actually reminiscent of kind of a pre-missionary foreign policy. It's a very like practically done thing. So first of all, perfectly executed. That's impressive. That's seriously impressive. You got to take your hat off to that. But also, one of the interesting things was that, you know, you would have expected the Trump administration to put in Machado, the Nobel Prize winner, instead of working with the Rodriguez siblings, who are like the core of the old Venezuelan intelligence service. Okay, this is not neoconservatism. This is not like classic good neighbor policy liberalism.

• 2:21:58Speaker 02

  This is really gunboat diplomacy. And it's sort of wild to see this kind of Teddy Roosevelt diplomacy being carried out and apparently working in the present world. Because as far as I can tell, what the Trump administration intends to do with the current regime in Venezuela is basically just like, give it carrots and sticks such that, you know, the people in charge of it can just get rich. You know, and you're just like, yeah, like you are the head of the Venezuelan intelligence agency. You are a very dirty person. You've done very bad things. You are going to get rich and your country is going to get fixed. Totally alien to American 20th century foreign policy.

• 2:22:43Speaker 02

  Like, you know, or they tried to buy Maduro out. You know what would be an amazing policy? Buy out Kim Jong-un. Basically be like, you know what? Your country is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You're holding it in this like incredibly backwater prison state. The 20th century thing is like, no, we have to prosecute him like Hitler. Okay, we didn't prosecute Hitler, but we should have prosecuted Hitler, right? You know, Nuremberg trials for Kim Jong-un, whatever, you know? He's guilty of like, you know, insane crimes. These North Korean gulags are every bit as bad as they say they are. Horrible, horrible monarchy. You buy him off and you free the country. And he lives for the rest of his life in the south of France like a frickin' prince. You know where Kim Jong-un was educated? Switzerland.

• 2:23:27Speaker 02

  He was educated in a private school in Switzerland. His iPhone is probably the same one as mine. Right, you know, like, but he is terrified because he doesn't want to be Gaddafi'd.

• 2:23:39Speaker 02

  Right, and so you had this kind of, you know, this interventionist foreign policy where like the Arab Spring is like this, where it's like, we're gonna-

• 2:23:47Patrick Bet-David?

  But would that be interventionist for North Korea? Would that be expansionist?

• 2:23:51Speaker 02

  Well, the words, you know, you sort of, you shouldn't, you know, it would be normal in a way that the 20th century was not-

• 2:24:01Patrick Bet-David?

  And the reason I'm saying that is like, I'm not getting involved saying, "Let's get rid of them." Here's what, that's interventionist. To me, it's like, "Listen, hey, we'll buy you for 88 billion dollars."

• 2:24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:08Patrick Bet-David?

  "Step away, we'll take over from here." "All right, sounds good." So, we're expanding America like, you know, everything that we bought. We bought Florida, we bought Texas, we bought Alaska.

• 2:24:16Speaker 02

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

• 2:24:33Speaker 02

  But like, that is a realist, that is, you know, to me, realist foreign policy and isolationism have always been equivalents, because that's kind of the best you can do, right? Actually, the empire, you know, whatever you want to call it, our allies, our international community, has been a real loss to this country. It has not been running at a profit. The idea of running a foreign policy as a profit, that's like imperialism. That's gunboat diplomacy. Like what we did in Venezuela was gunboat diplomacy, right?

• 2:25:10Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not supportive of what we did in Venezuela?

• 2:25:14Speaker 02

  I know. I think that actually is very ambitious and interesting, and I hope it works out well.

• 2:25:19Patrick Bet-David?

  To me, to go in there with a Delta Force, preparing for it since August, you go in, you take him, you leave, wasn't expecting it, everybody was shell shocked. No, you know, the way was done, quick operation. I mean, that's just insane to be able to get it done that way. Venezuelans are happy. Uh, Venezuelans here are happy. They're excited about what could happen next. Obviously controlling, leading. He joked the other day, he posted something saying the president of Venezuela. I don't know if he saw this or not. He posted something with the president of Venezuela. But this last tweet, Rob, if you go to that one, that he just, this is an hour ago. Iranian patriots, keep protesting, take over your institutions. Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price.

• 2:26:02Patrick Bet-David?

  I've canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the census killing.

• 2:26:05Speaker 02

  That's more of a neocon move, right? It's a neocon move because basically, and, and it's more reminiscent of kind of the American. It's more reminiscent of like the Arab Spring. You know, this is a sort of an Arab.

• 2:26:19Patrick Bet-David?

  What should he do? You're saying, don't do anything? Sit on the sidelines?

• 2:26:24Speaker 02

  It's a difficult problem. I would say that I think encouraging Iranians to do that, um, is bad. Because I think that they are gonna lose and a lot of people are gonna get killed. And a lot of people already have been killed.

• 2:26:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think while he's saying this, you don't think he already has his next 10 steps figured out? You don't think he already has people in there?

• 2:26:46Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 2:26:47Patrick Bet-David?

  What I'm saying is if you go this bold of an ask, you don't make an ask like this without already knowing it's about to be done. Don't you think? That's a big risk for a president to ask the people to do that.

• 2:27:00Speaker 02

  Trump is a, Trump is a mercurial man. He's a mysterious man. You know, the administration is actually pretty good at keeping secrets. I certainly don't know what is being planned there. Um, again, uh, you know, if you'd asked me before the Venezuela operation, I would have said, don't do this. Right? After it was done, I was like, you know what? Uh, when the facts change, I change my mind. So, you know, if you, if, if, I think it would be certainly wonderful if the Trump administration and the people of Iran could pull this out in some way that worked. It's a very dangerous thing to do. I think the probability of failure is greater than the probability of success.

• 2:27:41Patrick Bet-David?

  I agree. Just so you know, I agree with you that the probability of failure is higher. But sometimes you gotta take a gamble and is this a gamble they're gonna take? We're gonna see.

• 2:27:48Speaker 02

  Well, you're gonna see what they're gonna do.

• 2:27:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I, I think, I think the people who are surrounded. Around Iran who are.

• 2:27:56Speaker 02

  And you have an Iranian Jewish background, right?

• 2:27:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Not Jewish, Iranian Christian background. My mother and my father, they're Christian.

• 2:28:02Speaker 02

  The David, the David.

• 2:28:03Patrick Bet-David?

  The David, yeah, most people think that. Bet David and Assyrians means Betah, House of David. And the mother's Borussia Armenian. Uh, so, but I've been around Christians, Muslims, Jews my entire life. I mean, the story.

• 2:28:15Speaker 02

  You speak Farsi?

• 2:28:16Patrick Bet-David?

  I speak fluent Farsi, I speak fluent Armenian, fluent Assyrian.

• 2:28:19Speaker 02

  What do you think is gonna happen in Iran?

• 2:28:21Patrick Bet-David?

  Um, I think this is the closest it's ever gone. I think if Biden doesn't uh, uh, become president in 2021, Iran would have fell in 2122. So I think those sanctions were really destroying Iran and he just put on the sanctions. I don't know if you saw that two days ago.

• 2:28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:38Patrick Bet-David?

  He said yesterday, Rob, if you have this, any uh, anybody that does business with Iran, I'm putting a 25% sanction on you. I don't know if you saw that.

• 2:28:47Speaker 02

  I saw that.

• 2:28:47Patrick Bet-David?

  That was literally yesterday. So this has been the playbook for a minute. And I think uh, it's, it's uh, is that the one? Yeah, right there. Effective immediately, any country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay 25% tariff on any and all business being done in the US. The order is final and conclusive. Thank you for your attention, right? You should like this.

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  I love that. I love thank you for your attention. It's so good. It's so good. It's so.

• 2:29:13Patrick Bet-David?

  He wants to make sure you're paying attention. No, but, but to me, uh, it's the closest it's been done. And if you look at what happened with Venezuela just a few weeks ago, to be able to pull that off and pull this off within a few weeks.

• 2:29:32Patrick Bet-David?

  I, I don't know what award you give to this guy. To be, to haven't done that in 12, 12 months? How the hell do you do this in less than 12 months?

• 2:29:38Speaker 02

  Call me again, when he gets it done. I mean, I, you know.

• 2:29:41Patrick Bet-David?

  For sure.

• 2:29:41Speaker 02

  You know, you know, the, the, um, I mean, there's no question that the, I mean, the Venezuelan regime, I think is worse than the Iranian regime.

• 2:29:50Patrick Bet-David?

  You think so?

• 2:29:51Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 2:29:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Why do you say that?

• 2:29:52Speaker 02

  Just, you know, Iran is not full of chaos and crime. And the thing is actually.

• 2:29:58Patrick Bet-David?

  You must not follow closely.

• 2:30:00Speaker 02

  Not like, not like Venezuela.

• 2:30:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Hanging people and the way they're doing.

• 2:30:04Speaker 02

  Yes, but it's still a government, you know. Oh, now they're, they're going, they're going nuts, right? You know, but the thing is that, you know, there's, there's an old Arab saying, which is the, um, the just, the tyranny of the lion is better than the justice of the mouse. And in Venezuela, basically, it's just like, everyone steals independently. Everyone is a criminal. There's like a whole criminal structures all the way up and down like you're. And in Iran, at least you have a government, right? And, you know, those who believe that anarchy is better than government, like, they don't know their anarchy. Like, and Venezuela is not just, doesn't just have a shitty government with a shitty, you know,

• 2:30:49Speaker 02

  intelligence service controlled torture chamber or whatever. Yeah, it has that, you know, but it also has just like massive chaos and dysfunction of a sort that is not seen in Iran. And so, yeah, it's still like, it's a.

• 2:31:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Iran to me is a whole different story. Like, the levels of crime, torture, what Iran is doing, the, the proxy wars and the amount of different military Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, everything they're funding, they are chaotic.

• 2:31:20Speaker 02

  They are, they are creators of chaos. But the thing is, you can, you're still, I would rather walk down the street in Tehran than Caracas.

• 2:31:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Can we, can we get him a one-way flight, Rob? Just kind of send him there with a camera? Jake, you follow him with a camera? Just document it and see what happens and we send him to Brazil? Anyways, Curtis, this has been a blast. Really enjoyed talking to you. Uh, for the people that are watching, you can actually monact him. You may agree or disagree, like, I don't know what he said. You can ask him any questions on monact as well, but Curtis, I am looking forward to the next one, after seeing what happens here. Appreciate your time, this was fantastic, man, thank you. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye, bye-bye.

• 2:32:00Speaker 05

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