"Facts Create Chaos" - Douglas Murray: UK Riots, Mass Migration, Israel, & The Fall of The West | PBD Podcast | Ep. 469
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We don't know how many people are in our country. We don't even have numbers. We round to the nearest million on illegals. Millions. We've vastly underestimated our appeal and the number of people who want to come here. And if we don't have a sensible policy about this, this century is going to be a real problem. I want to ask you a question. Please. Do you think your establishment...

I don't think I'm establishment. I'll explain to you why I don't think I'm establishment. I'm losing contract, they're playing games, they're making my life a living hell, and I'm still not caving at them. The benefit of the migration largely accrues to the migrant, not to the society. It's not hard to pull up data and say, this is what we're willing to receive. It actually is hard to pull up data because nobody collects that data.

If I was to pull up right now... You're not allowed to collect that data in most countries. Logically, none of this makes sense. America is the most important country in the world. If Trump gets elected, what do you think happens with those two wars? He has a clever strategy on this.

Today on the PBD podcast, I'm excited to sit down with Douglas Murray, a renowned British author and political commentator best known for his research into the biggest issues facing Western civilization. And we talked riots in the UK, Europe's immigration crisis and the rise of anti-Semitism and also debated whether the establishment really exists. Things got really intense. This is an episode you won't want to miss. So let's get right into it. Did you ever think you would make it?

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All right. So today we have with us Douglas Murray, New York Times bestseller. He wrote a book called War on the West. He's written many other books that have done very, very well that a lot of people talk about. They say this is the gold standard for, you know, X, Y, Z topic. But then also at the same time, you know, my guest today, for whatever reason, pisses off guys like Malcolm Gladwell. I mean, I can give you a lot of names that they just get upset when they're around him. I don't know why.

We'll cover a lot of issues. You know, we were preparing for the issues right before we got on. And he doesn't want to talk basketball. I'm disappointed. Doesn't want to talk hockey, nor does he want to talk backgammon. But maybe a little bit about UK, Israel, you know, US. I was hoping we'd do some cricket. Yeah, we may do cricket. That's when I'll walk out. I'll say nothing about it. But no, it's great to have you here, man. We've been trying to do this for a while. I'm glad we're finally able to do it.

And, you know, most people who watch you, they obviously know who you are and what you stand for. But I want to get right into it. There's an article that came out. You said riots in Britain should be a warning to the U.S. And this is about a month ago, August 8th. And you were talking about in one of the interviews when you gave a stat, and I thought it was absolutely appalling. You said since 2008...

Of the jobs created by the British government since 08, 74% have gone to people not born in Britain. So one, why is this a warning to us? And how did Britain get here? It's a very good question. The...

The issue that I touched on there, there were these riots recently in Britain, which I predicted for many years would happen. One of the reasons they happened, there are lots of reasons. One is that Britain, like America, has lost control of its borders.

And on top of that, legal migration in the UK is at a historic high, legal net migration. Just to give some historic context, in the 1990s, legal net migration per year was in the tens of thousands. When the Conservative government left office earlier this year, it was at three quarters of a million. And that's net migration. Legal. Legal. Okay.

plus tens of thousands of people coming illegally on boats and through other means, possibly in the hundreds of thousands, that one as well. I mean, I've written about this a lot in the past. I wrote in my book, The Strange Death of Europe in 2017, about the integration challenges, the cultural challenges that come when you have migration at this kind of speed. But what you mentioned there, the piece I wrote in Spectator and also in the New York Post about that was...

People tend to find that the easiest bit to talk about in a way is the illegal migration. But what I was showing in that piece was that even if you take the legal migration in a country like Britain, which is very similar to all other Western European countries, you get this situation where it's got a benefit that's very clear to the government because the migrants, of course, do add. They add financially, but not in the ways that everybody thinks.

So in this particular case, the government can say we've added X number of jobs into the workforce. But what they don't say is most of them have gone to people who were not born here. And my view is it kind of breaks one of the pacts between the electorate and the elected, which is that the electorate vote generally for something they think will make their lives better.

They don't vote for something to make the lives of people who don't yet live in the country better. And so one of the points I've made for many years about this is if you grow the pie, but you give the pie to people who haven't been there for the baking, as it were, you break part of the pact. And the British electorate are pretty mad about this subject. And some of them, as I showed last month, are very mad indeed about it. I think that's a perfectly...

It's a problem that's perfectly possible to deal with. There's no reason why a country like Britain or America cannot have a migration, an immigration system that brings in, you know, talented people who are not going to be any kind of burden on the welfare state and for whom the benefit of their migration doesn't just accrue to them. And that's one of the other things in this area that's very important is that...

The benefit of the migration largely accrues to the migrant, not to the society in terms of the finance. The benefit of is more towards a migrant than the society. So meaning people come in and are winning more than the people that have been loyal to that country all these years. Yes. So how does that logically make any sense? How does that logically make any sense to, you know, a migrant?

Not treat your kids as good as you treat, you know, someone else's. I mean, you have to treat everybody equally, but it's your kids. It's your community. It's your people. Someone has to be sold that idea logically to say, yeah, that's the right thing we're doing. I don't think they do, actually. I think you can fall into it from habit.

There are lots of things that can make you feel better in the short term as people that are just not good for us. But they can make you feel better. If you'd laced my coffee with cocaine or MDMA, I would feel better. But it wouldn't be good for me. Well, I wouldn't drink it if I were you because that's what they told me they were doing that to make you fired up. So just be careful with that. But it was a little bit, so it shouldn't be too much of it. But there are lots of things in the short term could make you feel better but are not good for you long term.

Mass migration like that can make you feel better in the short term. As I say, it does grow the pie a little bit. It's just that people don't get a share in it. And the problem with the migration question, this is a problem that the Republicans will have to deal with here if they win in November, is that none of the answers to this are easy. I mean, again, it's like a drug. It's very easy to get into and quite hard to get off. In fact, very hard to get off. Take things like...

In Italy, it's a country I know pretty well, they had several years ago an election in which the main conservative running said that he was going to deport the one million illegals, which was estimated there were in Italy. I was never clear, even if he won the election, how he could do that. How on earth do you deport a million people? Let alone 11 to 20 million in the US. Right. And I have not, I have asked politicians in this country exactly the same question. How exactly do you do that? I mean...

The government in America, like everywhere, is not that great at doing a lot of things. How on earth would you pull something like that off? My point is that when it comes to the issue of migration, what actually happens is it's just so hard to fix after you've opened the door that basically nobody does.

I don't yet know of a Western country that has lost control of its immigration like America has or like Britain has, that has any idea of how to correct it. And I'm not against immigration per se. I believe that a society should have a sane immigration policy. Allow talented people in, allow a certain number of people in for humanitarian reasons, in exceptional circumstances. This benefits the society.

But it doesn't benefit it if instead of being a sort of trickle of a tributary into the society as a whole, it's a flood, which you then can't do anything about. The reason I haven't written about this that much since the strange death of Europe, one reason was that I had said almost everything I could say about it in terms of warning. And although a lot of politicians in America and Europe read the book, I was under the impression that they didn't know what to do about it.

One politician said to me on the continent in Europe, this is a very depressing book for me to read. I said, you should have tried writing it. These are really big problems in the 21st century. And as you know, they're made particularly big, not just by the inability of Western leaders to do anything about it, but by the fact that 50 years ago, it was hard to get to America from Venezuela, right?

50 years ago, it was hard to get to Europe from sub-Saharan Africa. Today, travel is cheaper and easier than it's ever been. And everybody knows how other people in the world are living. I mean, that's one of the things that these devices we all have, we've underestimated. Everywhere I go in the world, you know, you mean the poorest township in South Africa, everyone's got a device in their hands and they can see what life could be like.

And even if it's a life that we might not regard as being great ourselves, it's a lot better than a lot of the world. I think in general, the liberal democracies, the capitalist countries, we've vastly underestimated our appeal and the number of people who want to come here. And if we don't have a sensible policy about this, this century is going to be a real problem. Well, let me let me ask this question. This is the part that's kind of...

Confusing to me because when you're recruiting people to a company,

The way you'll filter them out is either by a degree, right? And you'll say, okay, let me see what level of education you got. I went to Harvard. All right. I went to UC Berkeley. Ah, I don't know if I want to touch Berkeley right now. I went to Stanford. I went to Penn. I went to Duke. I went to USC. I went to UCLA. Okay. You did a four-year program. Yeah. And I got my MBA. Where'd you get your MBA from? I got it from Michigan. I got it from, you know, Penn. Okay.

You filter based on who you think is going to be most productive for your company and you offer the benefits and you welcome them in. Right. If you are interviewing somebody for CFO, you're going to discriminate against somebody that doesn't have a college degree, doesn't have a high school degree. Yeah. You don't care what skin color that person is. You don't care what their religion is. You care the fact that this person is not the most qualified person to be a CFO of a company. Right. And I'm willing to pay you.

$250,000 a year for the CFO job, you know, whatever it is, if you're experienced, but you don't have it. No one's offended. It's very much a, you know, good. We have no issues with that, right? I may say, so Douglas, you're applying to be the CTO of our company. Yes. What makes you think you're qualified to be the CTO? I was a former CTO at Uber. How long were you there? Six years. Wow. That may overcome even where you got your college degree from, because why would Uber keep you for six years? Right.

So you can still hire based on data, background, all of that, right? Absolutely. Why should countries not apply the same method of research, background, standards to bring the best people to their country? Why wouldn't they use that same logic? Because it doesn't work at scale. That's my view. I mean, it should be able to work, but it doesn't at the moment.

The work you would put in to research somebody for a major position in your company is simply not the work that any government can do about the number of people coming into a country like America at the moment. Most people think the size of the state is a little bloated at the moment. Can you imagine how much bigger the state would have to be to do that kind of background research on everyone walking across the southern border?

I don't think you could do it. So, okay. So one you're saying is bandwidth. Okay, fine. But let me ask you this.

Could I not with all the data that I have, statistics that I have? For example, I had Dominic Tarczynski here three weeks ago. Okay. And I don't know if you know who he is. He's with the EU parliament two term. And he's with the Polish Poland parliament two terms. That's who he is. Maybe you recognize the face. Yeah, yeah. Of course, he's in law and justice. Yes, he is. And we sat there, we spoke. He's from Poland.

And he comes in and he's the guy that once he was being interviewed, he says, we will not let one, not one. It was with Kathy Newman. Yes, it was. It was with Kathy Newman. She says, a lot of people call you a racist, right? They call you racist for X, Y, Z. Rob, I don't know if you have the clip. If the audience doesn't know which one it is, I'm sure you know which one it is. You know, he says, I'm not going to let not one person in. Not one person can come in here, right? Okay, great. And he's sitting here. I said, so tell me statistics about Poland.

And he says, lowest unemployment rate out of all the EU countries, 27. Lowest in crime, lowest in rape, and lowest Muslim population, okay? Out of everybody. And this is the clip, if you want to play it so the audience can know which one we're talking about. Go ahead, Rob. How many refugees has Poland taken? Zero. And you're proud of that?

If you are asking me about Muslims' illegal immigration, none, not even one will come to Poland. Not even one if it's illegal. We took over two million Ukrainians who are working, who are peaceful in Poland. We will not receive even one Muslim because this is what we promised.

I asked not about illegal immigrants, I asked about refugees. And Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission President, says that you're racist. You sound proud of the fact that you haven't taken any refugees.

Of course, because this is what our people are expecting from our government. That's number one. This is why our government was elected. But this is why Poland is so safe. This is the reason why we had not even one terrorist attack. Look at the streets in Poland. And we can be called populists, nationalists, racists. I don't care. I care about my family and about my country. So you watch that, right?

So a country can say statistically...

from what region gives me the least amount of crime? Any country can pull up data and say, okay, Muslims that come from XYZ country, they're civil, they're great, we'll welcome them. Muslims that come from here, no. Our most crime comes from here. Christians from this place, Jews from this place, this is from this place, Buddhists from this place. It's not hard to pull up data and say, this is what we're willing to receive. It actually is hard to pull up data because nobody collects that data.

If I was to pull up right now... You're not allowed to collect that data in most countries. Why? In the US we can. You're saying in Europe, most countries you cannot? Most countries you're not allowed to collect that data. Why is that considered what? Discrimination? Because the facts would be what Cathy Newman would call racist. I mean, for instance, I was in Poland probably last about 18 months ago, and they had a huge influx, of course, of Ukrainians, Ukrainian women, primarily since the beginning of the war. Now...

I can't remember how many it is. It's more than a million. Two million, I think. That's a lot of people for a relatively small country, well, relatively small by American standards, country like Poland to deal with. How is it not led to suicide bombings, outbreaks of rapes and so on and so forth? Because Ukraine to Poland is not that big of a leap in cultural terms.

And the Polish are, you know, happy to, relatively happy to welcome in their neighbors in this distress because they are their neighbors and the Poles know that this could happen to them. And they'd hope that if this happened to them, their neighbors would help them. That's quite different to, say, Sweden taking in large numbers of people from Somalia.

Because we know that Somalia, which has had terrible, terrible civil wars and violence for many years now, and this is not the fault of the people in that benighted country, but it's inevitable that if a large number of people from Somalia, particularly young men, land in your country, they will bring a certain level of violence which the Ukrainian women moving into Poland will not bring. Now that's common sense, but it's also difficult.

And the desire, as Kathy Newman shows there, to simply say, well, that's racist or the facts are racist is overwhelming. And at the moment, that still works in terms of shutting down any of this discussion. I mean, I always say there are only three things with immigration that really matter. Speed, numbers and identity. Speed, numbers and identity.

You can integrate large numbers of people relatively fast if the identity is pretty close. You can integrate a small number of people with a very different identity if it's a small number and the speed is slow. If you do fast, large numbers with a very different identity, you've not got a hope of integrating. You've just not got a hope. Why would they? They can live in communities with other people who are like them.

And they don't need to be part of your society. And if you have no punishment, as it were, for not integrating, then, yeah, there's no incentive. And one other thing. So remember what we're dealing with in the 21st century is a lot of people leaving very benighted countries where the standard of living is just horrific by our standards. And when they come into societies like this one, Western societies in general, you know, even...

you know, particularly with the welfare state, you can have a much better standard of living than you could dream of in the country you've been from, you've come from. We don't know what to do about that. We just don't know what to do about it. America in particular, but Western Europe as well, is too attractive. This episode is brought to you by CarMax.

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Of course it's too attractive. I mean, but that doesn't mean she's for everyone, right? You know, a woman can be too attractive, but that doesn't mean she needs to have 50 husbands. You know what I'm saying? A building can be too attractive, but you know, only one family gets to buy it and live in it. You know, so we, we can, we can do that part and allow certain people to come in. But again, the background goes to finding a way to,

To identify a pattern of what produces, kind of like back in the days, you know how they used to say, you know, kids used to come to college in U.S. in the 80s or the 90s, they would stay.

Then it flipped. They used to come here, come to college and then go back home. Why are they leaving? After we educated them with our system, why are we letting these guys go? Let's find a way to keep them here, right? So retention went down. Well, who do we want to keep? If we just educated you, why are we giving you back to your country? Well, of course, if the person has paid their way in it, then you can argue that a lot of the university education system in the West is a sort of money-making scheme.

A lot of universities that just make money from foreign students charge them absolute top whack. They don't care. So how do you solve this? How do you solve this? I mean, in Europe, you're saying you can't get the data, right? When I'm looking at some of the numbers, Rob, if you want to pull up like, you know, even with Tommy Robinson, he's talking about what's going on in UK, walking around, getting into fights left and right. I typed in Europe's largest Muslim population, Pew Research. Okay. And let me see what year this is. So this is...

I think this is as recent. Oh, this is super old. Rob type in, type in Europe's Muslim population, what it looks like. See if we have one from 2024 on what the largest, you won't have accurate data for 2024, but what's the most recent one you'll get accurate. Is it the 2015 one from peer research or? Well, if you, if you take her, well, there's one thing I'd like to see how you break that one down. 50.3, like where it's at. Um,

Take the UK census that happens every 10 years. The last one was eked out bit by bit because the authorities were rather worried that the public would leap to certain...

conclusions about the data. So the data had to be... Rob, I just sent it to you, Rob, if you can pull that up. So this one I see, this is from 2015. Okay. So we're talking nine years ago, because if you're saying... And this is at the start of the migration crisis I wrote about in Strange Death of Europe. Yeah. So this one, number one, Germany was number one, 4.76 million, if you want to zoom in. France is second, 4.71 million.

UK third, 2.96. This is pre-Brexit. Italy, 2.2. Bulgaria, 1 million. Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Austria, right? That are coming in. You know, if you see the numbers, is there a pattern? I guess you wouldn't be able to pull that off if you can't specify. Is there a pattern of trying to see any kind of trend or data happening?

Of what types of migrants coming in are creating a positive, net positive valuation? No, nobody wants to do that. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Because then you might get some results you don't want. I mean, for instance, why don't we have crime stats for Germany, for instance, which is one of the countries that have taken the largest number of migrants in the last decade. There's no crime stats for Germany? You can't break them down by demographic.

Who thinks that's a good idea? Do it for France. That's a really interesting one. Crime stats for France. Okay. By demo is what you're asking. Can you see if you can find that, Rob? Number of violent crime offenses in France, 2016 to 2023. Okay. Damn. So it shows the growth, but it doesn't show. Rob, I have it from Statista. I just sent you the link if you can pull that up. And you'll notice a good amount of climb, almost 100% in the last eight years. Mm-hmm.

Okay, if you have that right there, Rob. That's what it's shown to 2023. Something happened. What did happen? Well, we don't know because we don't have the facts. Are you trying to tell me that no one on the conservative side has the brass or the ability...

to get in there and find ways to get the data, not even independently research organizations. Extremely hard to do. I mean, there are groups, I mean, Migration Watch in the UK has tried to do some of it. You can't collect, it's very hard to collect crime stats, particularly when, as in most countries on the continent, the identities of the accused are kind of hidden from the public. There's a trend in...

In the reporting, for instance, in Germany of any crime, you don't give the name of the person. You do first name and then letter. Same thing in the Netherlands. Now, of course, you can tell a certain amount from the first name.

By the way, this is... Well, let's just linger on this for a second. There is a reason for this, is my point. There's a reason why you can't drill down into this. Look at... I don't know. If you want to do one that's been very controversial and very obvious in recent years, which is the increase in rapes in Sweden, this is an enormously toxic issue. There you go. I don't know whether it's increased from 21...

Increased nearly 20 went up from 16,000 to 24,000. This is in an area which people should really care about. I mean, like rape stats is something that is very important to collect properly. It's one of the most underreported crimes. A lot of women don't feel able to come forward.

You should have a society in which people are willing to come forward and you should have a society in which when an increase in rape happens or sexual assault, the society worries about it because something's going wrong. For instance, if it's that the men who are already in the society are suddenly really getting into raping, you would want to find out what was causing them to do that. But it's possible that that's not the explanation. But you can't really know because...

We don't have data, it won't be collected, and it probably never will be. Who in their right mind thinks that's a good idea to not pull up data? That's one. Second, why aren't the guys on the opposite side doing their part to pull up, you know... We don't know how many people are in our countries. We don't even have numbers. We round to the nearest million on illegals in relatively small countries. To millions? We round to millions in countries about illegals, never mind onto legals.

The about the best, most reliable data you can get on, I think, any Western country on this is the census that happens every 10 years in the UK. Even that is not that easy to trust because it's massively underreporting people in very high density immigrant areas who I do not believe in their entirety respond to the form from the US data authorities, the UK data authorities that comes every 10 years. Yeah.

I'm pointing out that this is just information we don't have. And when you say, well, why wouldn't we have that data? I'm saying because the data could be dangerous. It could be dangerous for the society. It would be used by some bad people for sure in a bad way. There would definitely be bigots and racists and pot stirrers who would, you know, as with all dangerous things, pick it up and run with it. You might also say it's the right of the public to know.

My view is that for a long time, the view has been the public can't be trusted with the facts, so don't give them the facts. Public cannot be trusted with the facts if they don't give them the facts? The public cannot be trusted with the facts, so don't give them the facts. Why? If you give it to them, what do they do with it? They make the general argument. They kind of expose the lie. We don't know. They could do anything. I mean, we've made – I made this point after the recent riots in Britain. I said –

When you have mass legal and illegal migration at this speed and at this rate and with people from such a different identity, one of the things you do is you move a very, what was a very high trust society into a very low trust society. And that can happen from stats like this or it can simply happen on who do you give a pound to when they're begging on the streets. So if I look at this here, number of illegal crossings between border crossings, this is the one I just sent.

In the EU from 2009 to 2022, you'll see that. You know, where the 1.8 million in 2015. Yeah. By the way, which was vastly undercounted. In 2015, I was touring around all the places that migrants were coming in and the camps and refugee camps in Southern Europe and the Greek islands and Italian islands, south of Italy.

and so on. I followed all this firsthand. I saw it all. I saw the boats all coming in and the authorities greeted the boats and helped them in. And it was partly, I mean, there was partly a humanitarian catastrophe, of course, coming from the Syrian civil war.

But the beginning it was we should allow in Syrian refugees which there's an argument for, for sure. But very soon as I saw with my own eyes people were coming from all over Africa, the Middle East, the Far East. I met people who were from Asia who, you know, were from relatively well-off backgrounds but they saw that the borders were open and so they came. And of course they're still in Europe. None of them were being removed. Let me ask you a crazy question. So who has more power and influence?

UK or the entire Jewish community? What, the entire Jewish community in the UK? No, worldwide. Well, the British government, I thought. I mean, if you take out the Israeli government, because they've got all the benefits of a state. But sure, I mean, the British government is the fifth largest economy in the world. So fifth largest economy in the world. So they... So who... Okay, because this is where it kind of takes me. You know how...

In the Middle East, Iran had, you know, the Shah. Shah of Iran. And they used to call him the puppet of the West. Right? Until they realized he's a big boy now. He's no longer a puppet. You can't control him. And he became his own man. Then when he did, they found a way to get a guy who was living in France. When you say they found a guy. Whoever the establishment may be, whether it's US, UK, they found a guy who

that is living in France, Khomeini. Khomeini goes to Iran, the Shah falls. Iran's been a mess for 45 years since the fall. But that wasn't Britain and France. That wasn't America and France that did that. I didn't say no. He lived in France. He lived in France. And very, very unwisely, the French authorities allowed him to fly to Tehran. That, by the way, is one of the flights I most wish had never taken off. Yeah, you and I both. But where I'm going with it is,

Did that happen intentionally because they were getting too scared of Iran becoming too powerful and they wanted to kind of, you know, cause a fall? And this was their way of saying, here you go. Kind of like, go to Russia, right? The argument that is made where when the czar, Nicholas II, he's in Russia, he has the power, generation, family, right?

can't be controlled. You can't tell him what to do. He wasn't a puppet of anybody. But then, hey, maybe Lenin could be a puppet. So let's bring the Bolshevik and some of the arguments that are made. What? Who makes that argument? But hear me out with the argument. I make it here for you. This is where I'm trying to go with this.

Who in the right mind think this is a good argument to have this happen to EU? Who would allow so many migrants coming into EU for it to lose its identity? On what Richter scale, on what argument is that a good idea? Like even the financial guys, the money guys, Wall Street. A lot of times you say, who has the most power in the world, right? Well, it's really...

You know, billionaires. Okay. It's really the virtual governments. Okay. It's really the presidents. Presidents? All right, maybe. But let's go to the guys that have the money, who everybody criticizes, that gets to buy people. Go to the people of money. Why would they let this happen to you? Well, first of all, I think we might have a disagreement of the history of the Shah's fall and of indeed the Romanov's fall.

I don't think anyone orchestrated that, as it were. Revolutions happen. Just like I said, I wish that the plane had not... You don't think anybody was about to follow you around? No, no, hang on. Just as I said that I wish that the plane had not taken off from Paris with Romania on it and landed safely, I wish that the train had not left the Finland station carrying Lenin.

It was a very big mistake to allow Lenin, obviously, to get back to Russia. A historic mistake.

I mean, there is always a simple explanation of history, which is that somebody is guiding it. And generally speaking, I don't believe that. Just as a historian, having written about very complicated events in the past, my observation is, you know, would that there were a guiding hand that was able to do everything, but that there isn't. In fact, I don't want there to be, but there just isn't. There is no one force that's capable of doing something like that.

The Romanovs had problems that had been growing for two centuries at least. The Shah had problems that had been growing for decades. And then they meet the revolutionary force of somebody as evil as Lenin or Khomeini. And as you know, I mean, both of these men were, I mean, they were death forces, but they were forces of nature.

extraordinary evil men, but they had followings and they could get people to follow them and they could do these terrible things and turn over a whole country into civilization. They were able to do that. I don't think that happened because of anyone in Washington, D.C. Really? Yeah, I don't. I mean, of course, there's always an argument about Mossadegh earlier on, but...

No, I mean, I think it's consoling to people. I think there's a consolation to thinking that when these things happen, they happen because somebody, always in the West, by the way, orchestrated that to happen. I think it's a thing of consolation. For instance, if the Western countries wanted endless access to Iranian oil supplies, it wasn't a good idea to let Armenia in.

if people thought that the Romanovs were a problem, who on earth would have thought the Bolsheviks were the solution? Churchill famously said that this was like allowing a basilisk to be released in the society. But going back to what you asked about Europe, again, I mean, when you say where power resides, I mean, power resides in lots of different places.

And it oscillates. Sometimes a parliament, for instance, has a lot of power. Sometimes a single member of parliament has a lot of power. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes a parliament doesn't have power. Sometimes, like in the age of social media, social media has power and overtakes the power of politicians. And politicians have to cower from the social media. At other times, it's the other way around.

Social media companies can be very vulnerable to legislation from government. So there's never a fixed. I don't think there's ever a fixed. Do you think that's a naive way of thinking? Obviously, I don't think my own way of thinking is naive. Well, listen, I'm having this conversation with you because I'm curious to know how you process this part, because logically, none of this makes sense.

Let me go back to when you're saying, do you believe there's such a thing as an establishment, an anti-establishment? Do you believe there's such a thing as, you know, the groups of people of money and power behind closed doors that, you know, are the puppet masters who feel they can control and influence elections, societies, countries, wars? I think it's a low resolution way of thinking.

unpack that for me. I think that, again, it comes down to the nature of the world being extremely complex always, much more complex in this era where we get insight into things we would never have got insight into before. The ability on our devices to find out information we would never have been allowed to find out before, and to hear opinions we could never have heard before. There is, in my view, a

There are many temptations in this era, but one of them is to see specific guiding hands in certain places because it is a consolation to us to help us through what otherwise looks like something too close to chaos. So let me just take one of the words you use, establishment. Do I believe there is an establishment? No, there are lots of establishments. Lots. Lots.

There are financial establishments, for sure. There are political establishments, for sure. There's a Democrat establishment. There's a Republican establishment. There are different establishments within each of these parties. For sure, but what I'm talking about... But the idea... When you say an establishment, I want to like... Which one? What? Who are we talking about? Do we think that Donald Trump and Bill Clinton get together with Bill Gates and agree on anything? No. No, I don't think that's the community. But you think about in a...

in a company, take a 50 billion dollar company, right? You could be a director in doing the work and you're doing your part. Then you could have VPs that are newer VPs that have come, they're hungry, they're doing their things, right? Then you got C-suite executives that have been with the company for 28 years. Quite frankly, they don't want to fricking work anymore. I mean, I've worked with a company called AIG and I did business with them for many years, great experience, loved it. But the more and more I got in, the more I realized

There was an establishment C-suite executives that didn't want to work as hard as the others, but they had been around so much and they knew the dead bodies everywhere that they knew how to control some people to scare the shit out of them to say, Hey man, if you talk about that to anybody, you're going to hurt me. And because of that, I'm going to make sure you X, Y, Z said about you and the establishment of executives in a company, much smaller, uh,

have a lot of control for that company to expand. So you'll see a lot of big companies getting smaller because of the establishment C-suites at the top who have been around for 30 years that no longer want the startups to grow. They no longer want to hear about the shit about dreams and what if one day and what if one day and imagine one day and I want to move up the corporate ladder. I might one day be the CTO or the CEO. Oh, be quiet already, dude. Let me just freaking go golf three days a week. That is the establishment of a company filled with executives who

that can prevent this company from growing. This is why new companies come out, startups, and they destroy the establishment because they establish C-suite executives. That's what I mean as the establishment on a smaller scale. But that C-suite establishment... Yeah. I mean, there are many ways to look at it, but there are at least two ways to see it, which is, one, maybe that C-suite establishment does exist, and it does in lots of companies. It can. And also...

Maybe they're very vulnerable. And I can think of lots of cases where the people who, as you say, are basically checked out are very vulnerable. They may know where the bodies are buried and so on, but that doesn't protect you for all time. Or they're at the top of the C-suite in their company, but then the whole company is eaten by somebody else who comes along.

I mean, you must have seen that plenty of times as well. Of course. But that happens because of the establishment. So that's the point I'm trying to make to you is, for example, in Congress, okay, we don't have term limits in America. New guy comes out, he says, I'm going to be a congressman and I want to make some change. And he goes in, oh shit.

That guy just scared the crap out of me. I don't care. I'm going to stand up to him and her. Nancy doesn't scare me. Chuck doesn't scare me. McConnell doesn't scare me. Oh my God, I just lost and I didn't get reelected.

Hey, I'm so sorry. Again, that can happen and the opposite can happen. It does happen, though. It's not about it can happen. It does happen. Okay, let's say it does happen. The establishment does do that and control it. So all I'm saying is where I'm going with this is the following. Do some people in the establishment, okay? I don't like this use of the word the establishment. Well, I'll use it. You can use a different word for it. I'll use it. Do some people who are the...

Establishments who are using their tenure for being around and they know where the body's buried. Can they sometimes make some decisions that they think is the right decision that end up destroying what they once built or what they once helped grow? Can they negatively impact a society, a country, a company? Before I answer, I want to ask you a question. Please. Do you think your establishment...

I don't think I'm establishment. I'll explain to you why I don't think I'm establishment. I'll give you my, who I was, my background. I know your background. I just say, but where you are now, why aren't you establishment? I'm not at all part of establishment. I don't take money from anybody. I don't take sponsorship. I don't have to, now hear me out. Let me tell you this. I got a call from a guy. So, and I won't give the name, but you know who this guy is. Maybe you would know who this guy is in the game of,

agents managers representatives he's at the top okay so hey listen um if there is ever an interest in wanting to have us represent in the sale or in the partnership of the podcast being with xyz company to get 100 million here a couple hundred million here whatever it is

You got to kind of be careful to not have those types of guests on anymore. I got this call. I'm just telling you, I got this call. Here's how the call went. I said, here's the difference. I'm a self-made guy. I made my own money. I came up, had a 1.8 GPA. I don't have a four-year. I don't have a two-year. I'm an army guy. I love numbers. I'm very good with numbers. And I love people. I got into financial services. Somehow, someway in the insurance industry, they couldn't stand me.

Because I was not a golfer. I'm in an insurance industry. I've golfed 18 holes in my life, maybe five times. I can't stand golf. I'm not that guy. We are in utter agreement. Okay, I'm not that guy. I don't have the patience for golf. So I will caddy for you and we can have a nice cigar, but I'm not going to sit there and golf with you. That's not me. So nothing about my profile of being in the financial industry was...

The ideal guy. Then there is disruption. Then we have market share. Then we grow. Now we have enemies behind closed doors. I'm losing insurance carriers. I'm losing contracts. They're playing games. The guys that have been around for 30 years who have a nice, sweet little business, don't like a guy like me coming in. They're making my life a living hell. And I'm still not caving at them. And then eventually we sold the business. And then I came to start my own company now. We're media consulting, all the stuff that we're doing. Yesterday we had an event.

Palm Beach Convention Center, we had nearly 6,000 people in the room. We had Dwayne The Rock Johnson, people showing up from 100 plus countries, executives, founders, private equity guys, VCs, and they're coming in and we're not sitting there saying, hey, I owe this guy, better do this or else that guy, this guy, I don't do well with this. All I'm saying is, you asked me the question, I'm giving you the establishment side. I sit there and I think about

Who the hell, even with the people that have the money, the only way this could be happening is because somebody's allowing for this to happen. Somebody at the top has to be allowing for this to happen because they think it may be a good idea or there's a deceptive idea reasoning behind it. Okay, let me, first of all, just to say again, when it comes to your own example, I can imagine somebody, as with me, accusing you of being part of an establishment.

An establishment. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Not the establishment, because what I'm saying is I don't think that there is the establishment. I think there is not. I think there are establishments. No, no, but I think... And I know, by the way, what people say about it is, oh my God, he's covering up for the establishment. I just don't, as I say, I think that there are different establishments and different gatekeepers in different industries. And you just described your experience with one.

But it'd be perfectly possible if I was a guy who was down on his luck somewhere in the U.S. and I wasn't on the ladder yet and I wasn't doing so well, I might well look at your CV and think, oh, he's part of the establishment.

or an establishment, at least. An establishment is different than the establishment. No, but again, somebody could easily say, end up pushing you that way. My point is, I just don't think, I don't think that the parameters on this... If you're trying to teach me English, you're right. If you go on the English route to say, here's the... Well, I'm going the logic route. No, it's not the logic route. Where I'm going with it is different than the exact definition. Yes, this is our building. This is our establishment.

It is. Yes, this is our restaurant. It's my establishment. Yes, this is our comedy club. It's our establishment. Yes. But the establishment is behind closed doors. No, but I'm saying you have power of some kind. If we're going to play that game, then you have power. No, not at that level, though. You're talking about... No, no, well, of course there are different levels of power and different levels of influence. What I'm saying is that, and you gave the example of pre-revolutionary Iran, pre-revolutionary Russia, the Romanovs seem to have all the power.

They were the establishment. Turned out it didn't do them any good. You don't think U.S., Kissinger, U.K., MI6, CIA had a role in causing the Shah to fall and not send help when he needed it, when the revolution is happening, when Kissinger promised them he would? You don't think anybody played a role in causing the fall? We can get into that. I mean, I think that you will probably know your history of 79 better than me, although you were also not.

How old were you in 79? I was born in 78, but I was born in, I lived there 11 years, 10 and a half years, yeah. And of course, in Iran, Iran is, of course, one of the countries in the world that, if you're British, is most flattering because the Iranians still think the British run the world. It's very nice country.

Very nice for Britain to hear. Well, you did for Iran for many years. You had British petroleum, you had the oil, the whole contract. But there's always been a lot of belief in the sort of hidden hand of the power of the Brits. To this day, a lot of the Iranian press still suggests that America is only doing what Britain tells it to do. Again, deeply flattering to anyone who's British, but not true. I don't think that...

What I'm trying to get to is, no, I do not think there is an establishment in the West that is capable of doing the things that you suggest. Who is capable of causing mayhem? Which establishment is capable of causing mayhem in EU countries?

that is not just this whole thing happened accidentally. Again, I just resist a sort of low resolution analysis of what is a very complex and potentially lethal problem. I would love it if it was the case, and I've had so many people who've tried to argue this to me since Strange Death came out. I'd love it if it was the case that there was a document from the establishment in the EU that explained its border policies in the last 60 years, let's say.

There just isn't. I'll tell you what I think has happened. Very, very straightforward human explanation. The borders started to open after the Second World War. They invited in what were called guest workers, the Gasterbeiter Programme in Germany, mainly people from Turkey. They asked them in, invited them in, because there was a need to reconstruct Europe after the war.

There was an assumption, Angela Merkel herself said this in 2010, there was an assumption that the migrants would go home after they'd arrived. There was, every mistake possible was made, but, and in retrospect we just say, how the hell did they make this mistake? I mean, who could have guessed that a Turkish man moving to

Hamburg, Berlin might want to meet a nice woman. And if he met a nice woman, might want to have nice children. If he had nice children, might want a nice house and a nice salary and so on, and might not want to go back to Turkey. And that's one of the better countries that people enter Europe from. They didn't see it coming. They didn't predict that. And they slowly, as the decades went on, lost control.

And every single time, as a famous politician in the UK said, every single time somebody inherited office, they saw all of these problems they're inheriting. And they could see the problem was getting worse and worse and worse. And they knew that they were less and less capable of dealing with it. And they knew that they should leave it for their successes because this was too difficult to deal with today.

Now tell me that when we come to the case of the US, something similar isn't happening. What has been the story of illegal migration in recent decades? Always, always the push to say, look,

We're not going to be able... And this is from Reagan, and this is from everyone. The dreamers. Why was this framed as the dreamers? Because always it is, look, we've lost control of the border. Millions of people have come in illegally. Nobody has controlled it. It wasn't that Dr Kissinger or Hillary Clinton or anyone else wanted this to be the case. Although there are some politicians, I should say, who do like the idea of utter chaos, and we can come back to that if you want. But...

Every single time it was these people are in our country already. What do you want to do? Keep them in the black market? Keep them working illegally? Keep them in this shadowy shadow economy? Or should we just say every, say, 10 years amnesty? It's so much easier to do the latter.

If we were sitting here and we were talking about Amnesty and you say, why not get these people into the legal job market? And why not let's get them paying taxes? And the easiest thing in the world is to say, you know, that makes sense. Yeah, let's get them into the economy. Of course, the harder one, the restrictionist argument is every time you do the amnesty, you give the thumbs up to another X million people to cross the southern border.

Look, it's just easier for them. It is much easier for them than, to go back to the example I gave from Italy, putting a million people on buses and trains and sending them back to North Africa and from North Africa to every country they've come from. This is just so much bigger than the idea that there's somebody who wants it to happen and that's why it happened. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world.

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Okay. So you wrote a book titled The Madness of Crowds, right? You got gender, race, and identity. We may differ here, but that's the part of conversation. There's the risk of me being wrong, you being right, and vice versa, or neither one of us being either one of them. An audience is there and agrees with you or with me. Who do you think is more influential? The loud, screaming, crying, complaining crowd? The mob?

Or, in my case, you're not going to like this word, but I'm going to use the word and you can define it any way you want and you can say it's elementary, but a powerful minority of folks who are working behind closed doors to keep control and influence around the world. Meaning?

You got two guys, right? Say you're a governor, you're a speaker to house, you're a Senator, you're a president. What's more scary for you? Is it,

10,000 of us marching in the streets saying, you're the worst leader, you're an anti, you're an Islamist, you're a horrible human being, this guy doesn't deserve to be in office. Does that have more power? Or the guy from the top and says, hey, Douglas, here's what we need you to do tomorrow. You're going to get in front of the crowd. You're going to do this, you're going to do that.

Or else you're not going to get funded for your re-election. Nothing's going to happen to you. Who do you think has more power? It would depend absolutely each time and always on the circumstance. Absolutely each and every time. Look, sometimes the crowd breaks through. Sometimes it fails to break through.

Sometimes, if there is anyone in the position you describe, sometimes there are people who have power. Sometimes you can, you know, one of the interesting things we've learned in America in recent years is, you know, sometimes you can pull a lever and it turns out nothing happens. There are lots of situations where the person who is assumed to have power feels effectively powerless.

I mean, one of the reasons I am not a, as I say, low resolution, there is a explanation for everything. There's always a person or a document and so on, or a secret tape is because my experience of watching TV

politicians and others in many countries is I'm always struck by the extent to which they feel incapable of doing things because there are things in the system. Again, left and right, you see the same thing. Things in the system that just don't work, things that are broken, things that are meant to do one thing and do another. But when you get to the points, as you say, where the crowd can break through,

Who knows? We have lived in recent years through several big things in America where the crowd got damn close to breaking through and sometimes did. Look, what happened in the summer of 2020 when Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and everyone else at the top of the Democrat Party is on their knees wearing some Native American shawls,

staying on their knees for nine minutes or whatever, because it's the same amount of time as George Floyd's death. And they all have to be like winched up afterwards because Nancy's knees locked and Chuck couldn't get back up. I mean, like what, what were they doing there? Now, these are people that we would say, um,

This is an establishment. Exactly. This is an establishment. No, as I say, this is an establishment. This is a part of the gerontocracy of the Democrat Party. Right. OK. But what were they doing there? They were literally kneeling to the crowd. They were saying, we think the crowd is getting kind of close to our home. And so we are going to literally kneel to them.

These people at this point clearly felt incredibly fragile, like wildly fragile. They knew that there was a kind of revolutionary thing happening in America. You had cities burning down. You had people being attacked all over the place. Law and order broke down in many cities. So that's an establishment at a moment of real worry. I think that happens much more often than people think.

When the crowd went, when the mob went. Both. Both sides are able to be. Which has more power. Maybe you don't have the. The point is you can't. As I say, it's all to do with specific circumstances. When riots broke out the other week in the UK. OK, the authorities lost control of the streets in certain towns. Now, here's the thing.

They lost control. Some of the public was so angry because of these three girls killed at a Taylor Swift dance party that they just went out and started just like, I mean, why burn down a police van for God's sake? Why burn down a police station? Because the crowd was doing stupid and awful things that crowds and mobs can sometimes do. But here's the thing.

The authorities at a time like that, and in that situation it's police authorities, political authorities and others, they start to feel fragile themselves. The prime minister will start to be thinking, oh hell, we're losing control of the streets. Now, in that situation, are there some moves he can pull? Yes. Did he pull them? Yeah. The one he mainly pulled was these people on the streets asking

even the ones who were doing nothing violent and just objecting to somebody being... young girls being stabbed at a Taylor Swift dance party, that these people are all far right. And that was what Starmer and the UK government did. And an establishment, an authority in the UK started saying... So that was the move they were able to pull. But at that moment, it's incredibly fragile. Every...

It can go either way. We've seen examples, as I say, in American recent years where the crowd can break through. January the 6th, all sorts of things like that. And what happens at a time like that? There's people who do one thing, then an accusation can be made by these people there about that. Right.

This is much more fragile than people think. And as I say, the biggest temptation in our era is to say it's all controlled by something because it would be so much easier to understand if it was. Yeah. I don't know if it's all the time, but for example, so one may say, okay, you know, you guys are both being naive. Let's just say the audience says that, which I'm sure you would disagree with. But what if somebody says, why are you guys thinking so small? It's the same. The two are the same. What do you mean they're the same? Let me explain.

The mob is funded by the people at the top, the minority, and they stoke. They're like, hey, piss these guys off. Blame those guys. Create a problem. Identify the enemy and blame him. You create the problem. That can't be done. You blame him. It can be done. And then come in and say, let me get on my knees for nine minutes. But guess what we did at January 6th? We know they're coming. Guys, get out the way. Okay. Let them do it. And then point the fingers and then come in to say, right? Mm-hmm.

The last, if there's anything the last few years, Douglas have, and by the way, that's to me with Iran as well. The one thing with Iran was in 1954, U.S., U.K., France, I think it was Germany, signed a 25-year oil contract with the Shah, 1954. Wow.

You know, when that contract came up, 79, you know, when he fell 79. So, so for me, and then there's a meeting and you will not be able to persuade me that Henry Kissinger may need to take control. I'm not going to, I don't think I'm going to be able to persuade you there. Although there's plenty of, you know, things you can write to see that as well, whether you're buying to it or not, it's a different story. But to me, it's in that case, U.S. could have helped. U.S. could have supported.

If Jimmy goes December 31st, Carter, and says, you know, Iran is an island of stability. A year prior to the revolution happening, you go to Iran, you do a toast on December 31st out of all the places you have in the world to be. You go to Iran 1977 to do a toast and you say, Iran's the island of stability. That's December. And then a year later, you say, oh, we got your back. We got your back. You get out of the way. That's a form of, hey, guys, don't worry about it. These guys are about to fall. Khomeini is not going to be able to negotiate as much as we are.

They're going to be so desperate because their infrastructure is going to be so messy. They're going to need money. We'll get it at discounted rate. Why if there is a guiding hand or a guiding group, are they so bad at it? Well, because they think they're God and they're not. But,

But if you kept making this number of mistakes, you'd stop thinking you were God. Are you kidding me? You don't think we continue to make mistakes? Man is a sinner. Man continues to think they can outdo God. Man continues to think they're smarter than God. I mean, we're always going to be falling for that trap. No one's ever going to find out. We're going to do it better than them. Communism, he didn't do it well, but we would do it better. Social, we would do it better. That's the concept, right? Sure, that's always the temptation. But it's a temptation of thinking we...

We know better. I have four kids, right? It's like, yeah, stop it. But I'm sharper than you, dad, when I was 12 years old. Oh, okay, bro. Go ahead, right? That's the element that we think we won't get caught. By the way, a lot of people ask us, how the hell do you guys get all this content, research, AI for your PBD podcast? How do you guys pull all this information out? We worked the last 12 months and hired 15 machine learning guys and built a news aggregator site

that we want as a customer, we decided to build that and release it to everybody. And if you've not seen it, it's called vtnews.ai. You can track timelines of stories. You can find out which stories are lopsided. You can find out any story who's reporting it on the left and the right. And last but not least, it's the only new site to date that you can go to the AI and ask questions specific to news

and it'll give you the answer back. Not just picking a few questions that may be the questions you're going to ask. Any question you want to ask, our AI will respond back to you. If you haven't gone to it yet, go to vtnews.ai or click on the QR code here to learn more, get registered so you can have access to the technology. So that's the part where I think, you know, then the challenge becomes,

Okay. Then the challenge becomes like, if I ran for office, which I never will, I'm not born here, so I'm not running for office. If I ran for office, I'm pulling data and I'm looking at the data saying, "Hey, who are the best immigrants here that contribute to society the most?" You can find it in US, it's Indians, number one. - Yep.

More than anybody else. You can pull up, I don't know who number two is, but you know this. Yeah, massive outperform on median household income and everything. That's right. So you kind of be like, listen, guys, how many of those Indians have? Guess what? Let's take another 10 million. Let's take another 3 million. Let's take another 2 million and let's spread them apart by states because when they come in, their kids become engineers. They raise their kids up. Let's take Asians. Let's take this. Let's take that.

because your job is to make sure you, and then at the same time, the one part that they've not been doing, I don't know this, but I'd be curious when I ask you the question. Actually, I'm going to ask you right now as the next question is, you know, we used to have a lot of babies. We used to make a lot of babies. US is at 1.6. Japan's at 0.7, sexless society. Muslim nations, they're not at 1.6. They're not at 0.7. You know, if this goes the way it's going, you don't have a choice.

Well, that's one of the explanations for why mass legal and illegal migration is allowed in Western democracies is that it is also able to make up the shortfall like that. Yeah. There's a demographic problem in most developed countries. And I mean, if you speak to the Japanese about this, one of the interesting things about it is, of course, is that they have this terrible replacement, you know, sub, you know, as you say, under 1%, 2 to 1 replacement level of

But they have made the decision that they will deal with that shortage in the labor force and the pension payments and else through various means. But the means they don't want to do it through is through immigration. They've decided, I mean, because they know there's what's called the pyramid in immigration, where if you are having to bring in more people to pay for the pensions of the people who are,

you know, pensionable age, you then have to bring in more people underneath them to pay for those ones pensions when they go up. And before you know it, the whole thing has grown all the time. It's going to eventually collapse. The math goes against you. I look, that's, that's my view. And I, I always, you know, I always cite, um, the famous Herb Stein's law, you know, that one, um, things that cannot go on won't. Um,

Sounds like common sense. Yeah, except that I've learned in the course of my career the number of times I've thought that things obviously could not go on.

They just do, or they do for a very long time, or they do much longer than you'd have expected them to. I can see that. I mean, I think that about European society. I think that about the illegal migration in the U.S. I think that about the welfare system. I think that about, I mean, just take the number of people in the U.S. now who are relying on some form of housing. New York, where I live,

Billions of dollars a year being paid to keep illegal migrants in hotels. How many years can New York keep housing anyone who's walked across the southern border in the Watson Hotel near Columbus Circle? I don't know. I just thought not very long. But I bet you the city authorities and Kathy Hochul and everyone else will try to keep it just as long as they are in office. And then they'll hand it over to their successors. And at some point, the thing goes bust. That's how it happens.

suck israel so in u.s something interesting is going on in the u.s where you know you have this whole october 7th once it happened and you know reaction cannot believe what took place you know conversations you pierce morgan a lot of different and then got heated and more heated and more heated and then there was a sect in u.s that uh

you know, became not necessarily anti-Semitic, but hey, you know, the division between Israel and this is them and they're causing this, it's their fault. And, you know, why are they starting it and back and forth? And you're seeing the protesting in the States that's going on in many different colleges and universities that's going on here. And I don't know if, did you watch the recent podcast? What's his name? Tucker Carlson did with,

What's his name? It's a very, very good podcast. Can you zoom in to see what his name is, Rob? Did you watch his show between the two of them? Oh, yeah. This is this story no one's heard of. Yeah, this is the historian you're saying that no one's heard of. And if this is the clip, Rob, matter of fact, just play this clip. Is this the one where he says he's talking about Churchill and Hitler in this one? Yes, this is that clip. Play this clip. Play this clip. The reason I resent Churchill so much for it. Go back a little bit. Go back a little bit so he can hear it.

Yeah, go for it. The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way. He had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers. He was literally by 1940 sending firebomb fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest just to burn down sections of the Black Forest. Just just rank terrorism. You know, the reason I read if you watch this.

If you watch this whole thing, which I don't know if you have or not. Okay. If you watch it now, Tucker, I've read the main points. Okay. Got it. Why do you think there is a split? Not even within the conservative movement about Israel, where some are taking different positions than you would think. Conservatives would typically be supportive of Israel. Why do you think that's happening? I think it's the same thing. There are splits everywhere. I mean, um, the splits on the left splits on the right, um,

who agree with Republicans on certain issues, other Republicans that would agree across the aisle on a different issue. I think there are lots of issues that are not left-right. Israel was never a left-right issue particularly. It's been, you know, certainly support for Israel has been a left-right consensus in the US. In the early years of Israel, of course, until 67 and 73, partly because of Soviet support early on and partly because of the Kibbutznik movement, it was seen as a socialist thing. All the left supported it.

There was a residue of right-wing anti-Israelism in that period. It never quite went away, but largely disappeared. But this guy is on a different strand, isn't he? But it's quite interesting that this guy's ended up here. I find anti-Churchillism to be a very interesting, weird diversion. As far as I can see, all of his facts are wrong.

If anyone wants to read two very, very good rebuttals of the things this guy says, they should read...

The historian Andrew Roberts, whose book Churchill Walking with Destiny is the best one volume biography of Churchill done in recent years. And they can also read Victor Davis Hanson's response to the interview. Victor Davis Hanson, of course, author of many great books of history. This guy, I mean, his timeline was out on absolutely everything. It's embarrassing. He didn't know when Churchill became prime minister. He blamed things that had happened before Churchill became prime minister, when Chamberlain was still prime minister.

He made completely erroneous claims about when Churchill was first Lord of the Admiralty and what he did. Made this completely cuckoo claim about what Churchill did where he wasn't even there in relation to the First World War. All of his stuff is off. So you did watch it. You paid attention. I did not watch the whole thing, but what I did was I read every summary I could of it. Look, if you look at the 1940s and you decide that Churchill's the baddie,

You're not in a good place. The war, to restate something that every elementary school kid should know, the Second World War started because Hitler invaded Poland. And then he started invading Western European countries as well. There was no point in this time when Churchill was causing the war. It's an astonishing piece of ignorance. But...

It's just, it's a revisionist type of history, which we have seen before. Everybody who knows about the Second World War period knows there is always some kind of, there's always some revisionist, David Irving did it in the past, always wanted to show that Hitler didn't really mean to do anything he did. And it wasn't Hitler that was a bad guy. It was just the people around him who misled him and so on. This stuff is always around. It's like another one of the perennial traps for people to fall into.

How somebody can end up defaming Churchill like this is extraordinary to me, especially when they're wrong on all of the major facts and can't even get their timelines right. Britain was in a war of what we call a total war against Nazi Germany, which was a war to avert complete annihilation on both sides.

This man seems to think, as far as I can understand from the bullet points and summaries I've read of what he's written and what I can see from Andrew Roberts and Victor Davis Hanson's very comprehensive rebuttals, he seems to think that the blitz that my grandparents lived through in London was all Winston Churchill's fault.

My grandparents and others would have been very surprised to hear that in the year 2024 people were making that claim. I find it kind of despicable as well as just deeply disingenuous and just factually, as I say, as far as I can see, factually completely wrong. But I'm interested in why somebody would end up there. I wrote in The War on the West about the left's hatred of Churchill. And I thought about it a lot because the left in recent years has really been coming for Winston Churchill, his reputation, everything about him.

They accuse him of being responsible for the Bengal famine in 1943. Absolutely nothing. It's just another complete piece of fabrication of the evidence. Again, it's been dealt with by the Churchill biographers, Martin Gilbert, Andrew Roberts, all the others.

But, you know, now if a young person knows about Churchill in Britain, a lot of them will only know about Bengal famine and so on. There has been a concerted effort on the left to defame Winston Churchill. We know that. I mean, even with Obama getting into office, taking this, you know. Right. But this isn't... Exactly. This is Tucker. Right. But why is this coming from another direction now? I'm slightly bemused by it. Yeah.

You can make criticisms of Churchill, of course, and there are criticisms because, and you can say that, for instance, the grain that arrived from Australia to Bengal was too slow in 1943, but Churchill didn't cause the typhoon that started the famine. And, you know, it is possible that when you are running, you know,

the largest navy in the world, and fighting in Africa, in Europe, the Far East, and many other places, and you have an entirely mobilized citizen population fighting for their survival, that you are likely to drop some balls, for sure. And is that to be highlighted and mentioned? Sure, if you want to. You would also assume that standing alone against fascism...

would count for something. And why do you think the Tucker Tucker is very, I don't, I don't want to get into an analysis of Tucker because no, no. Why, why is it, is it purely for conversation? Is it pure? Are you familiar with Anthony C. Sutton? He wrote two books, wall street and the Bolshevik revolution, wall street and the rise of Hitler. Don't know. You've never heard of them. Okay. Uh, that face, do you recognize that or no? No. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, his claim was the fact that he, Churchill, had a choice between, you know, being a Zionist or a Bolshevik and which direction to take. If you've not heard what he has to say, he was an interesting guy back in the days. He passed away in 2002. He said that Churchill had to choose between Zionism and Bolshevism? Well, he's saying the fact that Wall Street had a lot of...

influence over the things that was happening. Funding. They were funding many different things. So they were funding, you know, supporting money on this side, supporting money on the other side. Yeah, that book right there, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Okay. Where he's saying a lot of the... There's quite a lot of literature on World War II, so forgive me if I don't know it. No, no, it's totally fine. I just think about it. When you see a...

like Tucker interviewing someone like that, you know, he's given that person permission to give their argument. And I'm trying to find out what the reason for that would be. You'd have to ask Tucker that. I'm just rather bemused. You've said that this guy, he said that Churchill had to choose between Bolshevism and Zionism. So again, so going back to it. So when, when you remember how earlier we were talking about the czar, Nicholas II, and you have Lenin and Stalin and all these guys,

And, you know, how, you know, they thought maybe Lenin would have been somebody that they could have controlled as a puppet master. Hey, we can help these guys out. And then they're trying to see like how they can. Who thought that? How can they cause a fall where this would be one way of causing a fall in Russia? But anyway, that's it. Okay. That's it. If you've not, if you've not looked into it and see his interviews, I don't even want to go there because it's going to throw everybody off. Okay. So let me ask you another question here for you. Jews. Okay. Israel. Israel.

Sometimes they get, you know, especially nowadays, the power of AIPAC, how much control AIPAC has, how much influence AIPAC has. If AIPAC wants to get rid of Cori Bush, they can't. If AIPAC wants to get rid of a Douglas, you know, they can't. If they want to get rid of a candidate, they can't. They have that kind of influence, that kind of money. Do you think they can't?

I think they have influence to be able to do that if they choose to. They can put some money behind it. Is there a reason why it didn't work with Al-Numar then? It doesn't mean that it's going to happen 100% of the time, but you have the resources and the influence. That's what some people are making the argument with. Okay. At the same time, you know, I lived in Iran. I lived around a lot of Muslims. It's a 99%, I think, Muslim nation. And we were a Christian family being raised there, my mother and my father, right?

Mother's Armenian. My dad's Assyrian. Assyrian, like I speak Aramaic. I speak Armenian. I speak Farsi. So that was us. And we go to a small little church and I went to an Armenian school called Gulbegnan and I went to an Assyrian school called Behnam.

And there you go, 99.4% of Iran's population is Muslim. And so it was kind of like, you got to be careful what's going on when you're watching news every night. The U.S. is the enemy. It's the evil empire. You know, the Shah was a puppet. They owned him. They controlled him. He was doing everything he could to destroy the values and principles that Iran has. And this was nonstop fed to you whether you had a choice or not. Do you think you have a little residue of that in your mental... Not at all. Like residue meaning like a...

taking that position. - No, no, I just think, do you think it's left any traces on your thought? - On the what side? On what it is to live amongst Muslims? - No, no, no, no, that kind of having absorbed that when you were growing up. - Yeah, my mother was a part of the Communist Party. She was part of the two day party. So she was actually, they escaped-- - Double danger. - Exactly. But my dad was an imperialist. So you wanna talk about, they got married and divorced to each other twice. No, literally.

They married, my sister's born, divorced, remarried, I'm born, divorced to each other. Like Elizabeth Taylor, yes, for some that follow the history. Yeah, she was part of this party. Oh, yeah, yeah. Two-day party of Iran. They were the ones who massacred big time in the 80s in the prisons. Yes. By the man who was just released from Sweden in the prisoner's war. Yes. It's interesting that you're going back to that. That was not good. Yeah, no, that was not good. But going back to this, your experience.

Jews, 0.2% of US population, 17% of all billionaires in US. Why do they make so much money and why are they so successful financially? First thing is that it's a funny one there. Sorry, I laughed just because it's... I think there are certain tropes that people fall into. We just mentioned one, which is the Churchill trope, which is a relatively modern one. But if you want to demoralize a Western population, particularly the British population, you have to come for Churchill.

And it's a concerted effort in my mind. I don't know what's happening with the Tucker interview, but the left has deliberately come for Churchill because it destroys one of the holy places of the British psyche. It destroys the idea that we have been a force for good in the world. And it destroys the idea that we...

what did happen, which is we stood alone against Adolf Hitler. And as a result, Western Europe and the rest of the continent, and indeed Britain, did not fall into the hands of Nazi fascism. But I'm interested when people fall into that. Likewise, and we mentioned some of it earlier, what I would regard as being not necessarily conspiratorial thinking, but falling into certain ruts. I think that the Jews are a sort of rut that people can fall into. And one reason I say that is because

It's a very interesting thing in the history of the Jews that they can be simultaneously accused of almost everything. You mentioned that they're disproportionately successful and wealthy. That's what Jordan Peterson talked about when he did a video explaining the IQ score of Ashkenazi Jews and explaining the fact that there's a reason why they make more money is because they're rich.

IQ is above and beyond the average community. And this is him talking about it. Sure, sure. Jordan's a great friend. I know I've spoken about this. But I just mentioned it because historically, I mean, Jews have been attacked for being poor as often as they've been attacked for being rich and sometimes simultaneously. 19th century European anti-Semitism, for instance, relied on the simultaneous, the cognitive dissonance of the Rothschilds and also poor Jews.

Eastern European emigre Jews. It's a fascinating thing about, I mean, why this tiny population in world terms should attract so much attention. It's because all of these things can be claimed simultaneously. Jews used to be attacked for being stateless. And in our day, they're attacked for having a state. Jews have historically been able to be attacked for being religious and also for being secular.

You can be blamed for the ultra-religious rabbi, if you're Jewish, and also for Karl Marx. My view is that anti-Semitism and attitudes towards Jews fall into a very, very interesting part of the human psyche. They are the perfect group for people looking for single explanations for things. They are absolutely perfect for it.

And history has shown this and all the literature and the writing on the history of the Jews suggests this. I find it very interesting in our own day that there is this deep interest in it. For instance, I mean, you mentioned AIPAC. What's the obsession with AIPAC compared to, for instance, do you know about the amount of money that Qatar pumps into this country? Why don't we talk about the Qatari lobby? Why? They have given...

of dollars, among other things, to Ivy League campuses. When campuses like Columbia accept millions of dollars in donation from Qatar, why is that not about the Qatar lobby? Why don't we hear about that? Because the Qataris seem not to be in the imagination, inherited imagination, of people as a guiding hand and as a

disproportionately visible minority. But you could do this. I mean, much more impressive in terms of donations to American lobbying entities is, I mean, like how much are the Saudis paid in lobbying in recent years?

Oh, it's such a clutch off-season pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant those blackout motorized shades. Blinds.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install. Hall of Fame's son? They're the number one online retailer of

Why does this question upset you? I'm curious. No, no, it doesn't upset me at all. But I tell you what it does do is it worries me. And the reason it worries me is because, as I say, I see people falling into a very dangerous rut. And

I know too much history, not, I mean, we always can know more. I know too much history not to recognize something that's happening at the moment on this question. It's a very, very strange thing when people with not very much knowledge of a situation start to pretend to be wildly knowledgeable about it.

And that's really what I've seen in the last year in particular in the U.S., on the right as well as on the left. This was actually a very simple question for you, to be honest with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's not that simple. It's actually a very complicated question. But here's what I was asking you. So I'm having a conversation. There is no simple question in relation to this subject. Well, let me unpack it for you so you kind of know how this came about. Maybe that'll give you a little bit different insight instead of thinking you're being cornered right now. So I'm having a...

I'm having a conversation. I'm a guy that wants to know a little bit of everything. I want to know what's going on. I want to hear both sides of the argument. That's where I'm at. I want to find out why a little bit of everything. I don't have time for every little bit because that's not my specialty. And I'll bring a guy like you because you're well-read. I want to hear your side. And I'll bring the other side. I want, you know, that's your world. You're in. I run eight companies. I got four kids. I'm a business guy. My specialty is a different. Yeah, but we're busy. But you choose what you want to specialize. You can't specialize in 50 different stories.

And we're having this debate. We're having this conversation. It's families. There is Muslims in the group who are friends, Christians in the group and Jews in the front and the community. We're having this conversation. Won't give names because then people know my people community will know what I'm talking about. I say, you guys, you have a, you have a choice. You have a choice between living in a city. That's a hundred thousand, a hundred percent filled with a hundred thousand Muslim families. Okay, great.

You can live in another city. It's 100,000, but they're 100% Jewish. Or you can live in a city that's 100,000, but they're 100% Christians. You got family, you got kids. Safety and where you want to raise your family, where do you put them? Rank it from one to three. Okay. One guy who's the Muslim, he's like, I wouldn't do any of them. I said, why is that? He said, because I want my kids to be raised around God.

You know, everybody. Yeah. I don't want it to be just one or the other. Sure. I said, but that's not this exercise. In this context, with this conversation, I want you to choose one. Okay. He says, okay, I'm going to go Christians first, Jew second, and Muslims last. And this is a Muslim guy. This is a Muslim guy. Okay. Another guy who's a Jew goes Jew, Christian, Muslim. Okay. Okay.

One other guy who's conflicted, he says, I don't care. Any one of them I feel safe with because I've seen good in everybody. Right. One guy saying this. But to me, statistically, it's not hard to sit there and study and say, why does a country based on Judeo-Christian religion attract everybody?

U.S. attracts Muslims. It attracts Jews. It attracts Buddhists. It attracts Scientologists. That's not a hard question to ask. That's not a hard question to ask. But why is it that a country that's predominantly Muslim not attract everybody that wants to come there? Why is that? So that's the part where I was asking you the question to say, if Jews are 0.2% of U.S., why are they 17% of billionaires? What values and principles...

Do they teach to their kids and families and communities that gets them to move up in the financial industry? This doesn't just happen overnight. No, I mean, there are lots of explanations for that. I mean, you could go the route that Jordan did, which is about overperformance. I think there's lots of other explanations. I mean, there's, for instance, in banking, the history of Jews in banking is very similar to the history of my own people in banking, the Scots.

Why did the Scots, like the Jews, always overperform in banking wherever they arrived? Because they were from very high-trust, tightly-knit communities, where if you lent and you didn't repay the loan, there was a social price to pay. That's how, basically after Adam Smith, that's why Scots and banking were so good, because the Presbyterian society had a social cost to pay if things like, for instance, a loan were not repaid.

you would not be able to remain in the community having been dishonest. Is it pure embarrassment? Is it embarrassment? Well, it's also ethos and ethics. It's definitely also ethos and ethics. I mean, if you have a community in which, for instance, I'm not saying there is any such community, but if there was a community in which lying was totally acceptable, for instance, you know, you would find it hard to have a mortgage system. Sure. Yeah.

So I think it's partly that. I mean, the history of the Jews in Europe is also partly to do with that, the existence of the lending markets. And that came about in part from, as I say, a high trust within a small community.

So it's bits of that. I'm not at all concerned about having this discussion, except that I worry about things going into it for this reason, which is I know the trope that this leads into. And that worries me. You see, I think that any time when society is febrile, and maybe we are especially febrile at the moment because we're living through this second era,

Dark age. So I say the first dark age was the one where we didn't have access to information in the Middle Ages. And the second dark age is this one that we're currently in where we have access to too much information. And people find it hard to sieve. As you mentioned, you've got four kids, you run a successful business and so on, not got time to look into everything. In this situation, I think that we are disproportionately likely to be looking for omni-explanations.

And I have certainly worried in the last year about people falling into this particular trench. It's one thing to say, I'm asking the question, and I'm perfectly willing to discuss it and debate it. Of course, we're doing that right now. But I also want to know why. Why is this back as a subject? Why do I see people online talking about Talmud and suddenly becoming...

Sorry, I mean, they're suddenly becoming experts in the town when they say things like, I've been doing my research. You haven't picked up a book. Come on. Yeah, you've been reading the commentaries. I mean, you do have to be rather suspicious about some of the places people fall into. In the same way that, look, if you just asked me about the Freemasons, I would be kind of...

Hmm. I wonder why we're talking about Freemasons. I just talked about it last week with this guy that was a guest of ours. Carlson. Randall Carlson. Randall Carlson. And he was a 32nd degree Freemason. And my drill sergeant in the military was a 32nd Freemason. And we talked about it two weeks ago. Oh, dear. Yeah, it was actually interesting. It's not that interesting. What was the famous phrase on Freemasonry? It's a

bronze key that opens a silver lock and a golden door that opens the room into which there's nothing. So you're not interested by it for...

The fact that there's nothing to it. Nothing to it. But one could say, we've had, what, 13 presidents that were former Freemasons. Oh, God, look, I know what I've led you into now. Jesus, I should not have looked at you. Why are you doing this to me now? God, you're easy to lead. This is... Surprisingly so. This is... Surprisingly so. Surprisingly so, if I can say so. You're so funny. So one thing you've got to get credit for, you're a very good shit talker.

And I don't know how that happened. I don't know whether that's a compliment or not. Shit talker is a compliment of mine. Okay. But let me go back to it again. I'm asking this question for specific reasons, because if you notice from the beginning of the, of the conversation you and I've had till, till now, I was data at the beginning with UK. I was data with Dominic Tarjansky on why Poland is a safe place. I was data with Iran. I was data with, uh, uh,

The 0.2% Jewish community in the U.S., that's what they... Yet...

The 0.2%, yet 17% is what we're talking about. Whatever, I think it's 1% of US, yet 17% of billionaires is what we have in the States. That's data. Why is that? That's not easy to do. How did that happen? So here's another question. Well, that's data people don't mind collecting, for instance. But I think there's a lot to be said about it. So for example, if somebody, if a college football team produces five different Super Bowl quarterback champions,

You have to kind of look into it and say, why are they producing so many Super Bowl quarterback champions? Others are not. We don't do that in loads of things. Oh, we do do that in sports all the time. Oh, yeah, absolutely. All the time. Yeah, and also very, I mean, very selectively. In sports? I'm assuming you're not a sport. Are you a fan of sports or not? Certain sports. Which sports? We don't know. Get into that because we'll be speaking a foreign language. We'll be speaking a foreign language to each other. So here's another question for you. See where you go with this one.

I asked you the question about what communities families feel safe in, right? And we talked about the Judeo-Christian U.S., everybody feels safe to be in an environment like this. You're going to be fine, right, to be in an environment like this. Why do you think the opposite is not true? Why do you think Christian families who are leaving their countries, they don't think about moving to Iran? Why do you think they don't think about moving to, you know, different Muslims? Why do you think they don't think that?

This is one, I will answer the question, but just let me do it in this slightly roundabout way. This is one of the reasons why I'm worried about this anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, which I see coming from right and left at the moment, is that there's a deep failure of recognition of what it is in our societies that's worked. And I think we're at risk of killing the golden goose by saying the gold isn't golden enough. The things that work in our society, very fundamental, what the framers, the founders...

the frames of the constitution realized. I mean, you know, maybe the only successful revolution in the world. They realized that things like freedom of conscience, freedom of speech were absolutely the bedrocks and that if you didn't get them, then the rest could not follow. If you don't believe in freedom of expression, freedom of belief, freedom of worship, a whole set of other problems come. They essentially, as I see it, fall down to the fact that if you are in error,

you cannot correct it. If you are in an era, you cannot correct it. Unpack that. So this is what John Stuart Mill, for instance, one of the great philosophers of liberty, unpacks in one of his most famous works on liberty. The free speech, the necessity of free speech in a society comes about in part because freedom

If you are wrong, you need to know you're wrong. So if you're doing the economy, if you're running the economy and it's not working, instead of keeping on allowing it to not work, you have to have your ears and eyes open for a system that works.

And it's one of the interesting things I find about markets, guys, in general, is their ability to pivot. In a way, by the way, it just goes back slightly to the politicians issue. One of the reasons I'm interested in the way in which market people think is that it's very, very different to the way that politicians think. Politicians can see a wall and they drive towards it at the same speed or faster. And you say wall, wall, wall, and then they hit. A market guy, you say wall and they move.

This is a very, very different instinct. But to go back to this, the ability to correct yourself if you're in error is absolutely key. The lack of information that has been available in not all, but much of the Islamic world for many centuries has caused a deep stagnation, a deep stagnation in those societies. And as I see it, the oil-rich countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia

although Saudi is interestingly pivoting at the moment, very successfully, really. They have been in the same situation that European monarchies were like in, let's say, the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries, which was they could not grow the economy. There was no such concept, really. You had resources in those days, sheep and crops, right?

As today, the Gulf countries have oil. But that money was held by a small number of people. And there was just no other way of squeezing money from them other than squeezing them further in some form of taxation or invading a neighbor and taking their stuff.

Much of the Muslim world, I think, has failed to grow in the way that the West has succeeded in growing in the last few centuries. And this causes many things. One of them is a deep resentment. And one of the most, I think one of the most important insights I've ever stumbled upon in my life in relation to that is there's a particular problem in the Islamic world, which people don't really talk about very much, but it's this, that people

that the Quran is meant to be the final revelation of God to man, the final revelation. There's none after it. And all the revelations that come before in the Abrahamic religions are part of Islam. If you are the recipients of the final word, and you are the followers of that word, and the followers of that prophet and that God, why is your society not working? And why are other societies working? I think this is a deep question.

psychological problem within much of the Muslim world, which is we thought we were meant, we were the winners theologically. We're the ones who got the final revelation. And I think, by the way, that much of the anti-Americanism, the anti-Zionism and anti-Westernism in much of the Muslim world falls down to this fact somewhere at its root, which is how come they're doing better than us when we were told that we were best?

And I think it causes serious cognitive dissonance. It's one of the reasons why the Muslim world is so vulnerable to conspiracy theory. It's why when a shark attack happened at Sharm el-Sheikh 10 years ago, the local authorities said that the shark that had eaten the beaver at the most popular tourist resort in Egypt had been sent by the Zionists.

This is like seeing the hand of the West in other things is an explanation for why the things are not doing well there. And in country after country, whether it's Egypt, which is doing comparatively well compared to some of them,

or Iran, the immiseration of the people, the inability to unleash talent and much more comes back to this small number of people benefiting and having no idea how to unleash talent underneath. That and political and personal and religious freedom, including freedom of speech and freedom of worship, are the absolute prerequisites. And that is why I cannot understand the suicidal anti-Westernism within our societies in our time. Because

As I like to say, you know, the footfall should tell us everything. Nobody, as you say, is trying to go to Iran in order to have freedom of religion. Nobody is going into communist China for a better life, certainly not from the West. You have a negative net migration, right? Right. And this is why when I think of the sort of college students who believe that, you know, no one's had it so bad as you do in 2024 at Berkeley, one of the things I sort of amazed at is like, do you not notice that?

that the world wants to come here? Do you not think there might be a reason for that? And do you not think that it might be because there are some things that we've done well here and that if we've done well with them in the past, we should hold on to those things? Yeah. You're a history guy. Got a question for you. I'm Armenian. I'm curious on how you're going to answer this. Let's see if this is going to piss you off or not. I'll be the judge of that. And I'll react to it. So it is what it is. So, you know,

The world has recognized the Holocaust, that it happened. Okay. A hundred plus countries, including Germany, you got reparations, you got all this other stuff. It'd be rather alarming if Germany hadn't recognized it. I know, exactly. But they even paid for it. So it's not like, you know, they went one up. They're like, not only yes, but we'll also pay our debt because of X, Y, Z. Right. But if there's anybody that knows about genocides, if anybody knows about genocides, it would have to be

The Jewish community, right, with the Holocaust. And the Armenians and others. The Armenians prior to the Jewish community, you know, 2.25 million, whatever, 1.5 million Armenians. You've got, I think it's 300,000, 400,000 Greeks and a quarter of a million Assyrians. And isn't it amazing that that's still a political issue? It is, but believe it or not, Joe Biden,

There's a first one that recognized it. Okay. I know. And of the 34 countries around the world that have recognized the Armenian genocide, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, US, Israel has not. Why not? No idea. You have to ask them. Don't you think that's a little weird? I don't know. It's one of those facts you can pull out that

I just don't know. You'd have to ask them. Yeah. And I'm curious because to me it would be like, you know, that part is a, it's not a, uh, like if there's anybody that would be the first to, Hey, Hey, we're the first listen. That's kind of weird. What just happened? I mean, there's just, I think there's a lot of weird stuff in the world. You can always pull something like that out. What are you driving at? I'm Armenia. I'm driving it because I'm Armenian, you know? So to me, like we don't sit there and we say,

You know, the events didn't happen to the Jewish community. But if you know that happened, you're not surprised. By the way, I don't know if you saw what Erdogan said recently. Did you see what Erdogan said last week? I follow him relatively closely because he's quite a close enemy. So Erdogan, if you type in news, type in Erdogan and Israel. I think that's the one right there. The first story, Rob. Zoom in a little bit so we can read it. I can see all the stories. Erdogan seeks Islamic. That's the one. Erdogan seeks Islamic...

alliance against Israel says it's expansionism. Right. So part of it, you know, you'll hear some people make the argument the reason why Israel doesn't want to recognize the Armenian genocide is because they may lose an ally like Turkey. But Turkey is not necessarily the biggest ally to Israel, especially the position that they're taking. I don't think Erdogan wakes up in the morning saying, I wonder how safe Israel is. No, I mean, Erdogan's a

deep opponent of Israel, of course. For sure it is. But what's your point? I just think if the Israeli community is seeing what's happening, they know what history is and they're seeing what Turkey and Azerbaijan was doing to Armenia. Oh yeah, sure. Why wouldn't they come out and say, hey, we don't support this and we also recognize the Armenian genocide. It's a little weird. Well, it could be a real politic thing of the very, very tense Israeli-Turkish relationship, which as you know, I mean, sometimes it's

Sometimes it's relatively tepid and other times it's absolutely rank, like with the Mavim Amara. But this is different. I mean, Erdogan is saying...

I mean, this is Erdogan doing Erdogan. I mean, as I say, I'm not... Hamas is not defending, only defending Gaza, but also Islamic lands. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I see Hamas deeply, deeply caring about other Arabs. I see that absolutely. I mean, Hamas's desire to simply help the people of Lebanon, like their friends in Hezbollah, they definitely care about the Lebanese people and

Definitely, definitely big humanitarians, these Hamas guys. Apparently, you know, based on this article, they're sweethearts. Yeah, well, I mean, Erdogan is an extraordinary little tyrant.

when he was almost overthrown the other year in that whatever it was that happened, when was it? 2016, 17, 18? When there was that sort of what seemed to be an attempt to overthrow Erdogan in Turkey. Do you remember that immediately, strangely enough, the next morning he had a list of 2,000 judges who were responsible for the attempted overthrow. Amazing how much data you can collect overnight if you're Erdogan and, of course, all the judges.

Yeah. Got there, come up. Edwan is not somebody I would go to for morals or advice or anything else. He's a piece of work. He has got the strongest military in the Middle East, though. He's an Islamist, very obviously. And he's also in NATO, which potentially was a big mistake by NATO. He is, but he's also talking about wanting to join the BRICS. I don't know if you saw that last week. He wants to join the BRICS, and that's kind of tricky right there if you want to do that, right? Sure. Because...

If you're NATO, you almost have to be anti-Russia, right? Or not necessarily anti-Russia. You have to be anti-expansionism of Russia. Anti-expansionism of Russia, right? It's just so funny. There is this rule that I have about when people, you know, criticize, disproportionately criticize Israel, that they always reveal something about themselves. Yeah. And in Erdogan's case, he's accusing Israel of expansionism and

You should see what Erdogan has done with the Kurds. What's your position with war? So right now, you know. What's my position with war? Let me explain what I mean by that. So right now, like with the Middle East. OK, so you got elections, you got Trump, you got Kamala, you got all the stuff that's going on right now. And, you know, some people are saying, hey, man, we got to see if Trump gets elected, Ukraine, Russia is going to be done. You know, you know, everything going on with Israel and Iran.

Palestine, Gaza, he's going to stop that overnight, you know. And then from there, let's not get involved in businesses that we have nothing to do. What's your position with that? What position should America take with everything that's going on in the Middle East? Well, I'd say it's another of the trenches that is available for us to fall into, which is the temptation to retreat from the world. America is the most important country in the world by an incredibly long way.

Not just financially, not just militarily, culturally, in terms of ideology, in terms of the spread of the ideas that come from America. I see no scenario in which America can retreat from the world as it is and for the world to remain as it is. And...

I know because people I know on the American right as well as on the American left, always, always at the risk of falling into the temptation of American withdrawal from the world. And I always have the same thing, which is, has America made mistakes? Of course. Has it got involved in things it couldn't deal with? Afghanistan? Absolutely. But that is not an argument for America stepping back. Because although America should be judicious in where it steps in in the world,

If it has no involvement in the world, other people will. And if America doesn't want to be the dominant power on the world stage, then it will have to cede the terrain to China or the Communist Party of China or whoever else. I'm interested, by the way, particularly on the right, I'm interested in this fall into the isolationist moment because it's very interesting.

Those people want America still to be the foremost country in the world, but don't want to be involved in the world. Interesting that. Don't want to be involved in every war. No, no, no. America is not involved in every war. Plenty of stuff. I mean, what's America doing in Myanmar? We're involved in the main ones, whether it's funding, money, it's, you know, resources. I mean,

What are the two main ones right now that the entire world... Well, the two ones that have the most attention is different. What's costing more than those two?

Well, the Syrian civil war that's lasted the last decade has cost far more lives. I'm talking about two years. The Syrian civil war has gone on for more than a decade now. More people have been killed in that than have been killed in every single war involving Israel and all of the Arab armies in the last 80 years. So it does seem actually that people's attention is sometimes very clearly on certain issues. So why do you think that is? A range of things.

In the case of, I covered the Ukraine wars with the embedded with Ukrainian armed forces and they're retaking Kherson or Mykolaiv from the Russians. So I've seen quite a lot of that war up close. That one is a very straightforward one. I don't believe that Ukraine is part of Europe, but it's awfully close. And if you go to the Baltic states, as I did again, I know 18 months ago, I suppose, a year ago. If you go to the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and so on, they are really worried about Russia.

Really worried. They have, you know, enlistment and so on. If you go to the central and eastern Europe, simply the further east you go across Europe, the more you find a genuine concern about this. If Vladimir Putin had succeeded in making it all the way to Kiev in 2022, Europe would be shaking its boots even more than it currently is. It would have, and it would have been an unbelievable success.

destabilizing effect on the world. It's not the case, as some people pretend, that Vladimir Putin is only interested in Ukraine. I know that because I've been to the country, not the state, the country of Georgia when he tried to invade that in 2008. So the idea that Putin simply has Ukraine in his sights is not true.

And should we get into World War III over this? Obviously not. I hope not. I hope not. But should he be allowed to gobble up nations? Whatever you think of them, by the way, and then this is a point at which a lot of people on the right will say, well, Ukraine is so corrupt and this and that. Let's say if I agreed with all of that. Nevertheless, not good for world stability to allow Russia to invade nation states.

particularly ones whose security that we had agreed to, whose borders we'd agreed to secure. I mean, that was part of the deal that Britain was involved in as well with the handing over the nukes in the 90s. So Ukraine is a war that is deeply troubling Europe and NATO, and therefore America does have interests in that.

So you're for that war? You're for the money and the funding that we're giving to that war? We could go into all sorts of the details of it. I have criticisms around the edges about the way in which the funding has happened, the way in which the arming has happened, the training and so on. But to date, Vladimir Putin has not been able to overrun all of Ukraine. And I think that's a good thing. And this has happened, by the way, with American funding, but no American troops.

And if people don't like the idea of American troops on the ground around the world in order to secure world peace and the global order, the global order of nation states, if people don't like the idea of American troops being on the ground, what else have you got available than helping and arming other countries' troops who are willing to fight for their own country? Let's see any other options. Unless you want, as I say, to just step back. Vladimir Putin wants it, he can have it.

Israel and the Hamas war has gained the world's attention because every war involving Israel always does gain the world's attention. And maybe it's because of what we were discussing before about disproportionate attention towards the tiny percentage of the world's population that's Jewish. I mean, I can't help thinking that is the case because, as I say, I just notice in country after country people being massacred and nobody gives a damn. I mean...

I've seen the massacre of Christians in the countries, in the Arab countries, and the destruction of the Christian communities in Iraq, for instance, destruction of the Christian communities in the north of Nigeria. The world is not focused day in, day out on these stories. As the old thing goes, if it's Jews, it's news. The world is obsessed with the question of Israel, and there are lots of reasons for that. And this past year, I mean...

I spent a lot of the time in Israel and Gaza. I'm, you know, the world seems to have gone crazy over this conflict. Utterly crazy. So what do you think is going to happen if Trump gets elected? If Trump gets elected, what do you think happens with those two wars? Do you think he stops it like he says overnight? We don't know, of course. I mean, because he actually has a clever strategy.

on this, which he did in 2016 as well, which is to say, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do. And I like that. I like that as well. It's a good, this thing of the interviewed politician having to give precisely what they were doing in office is not a wise idea. Right. Not when you're dealing with people on the world stage like Putin or Hamas. I don't, I mean, there is a, you know, I think that in the case of Ukraine, sad as I am about it, it'll,

it'll probably end up having to be a land swap situation and there'll be a redrawing of the borders. It's terrible, but since the spring offensive failed last year, I don't think that the Ukrainians have had enough of a military success since 1922. So I don't know how he would carve that out or how it would be done. In relation to the Israel-Hamaz war, it's not really an Israel-Hamaz war. It's an Israel-Iran war. I mean, it's a war between...

at the moment, one of Iran's proxies, the revolutionary Islamic government, Iran's proxies, Hamas and Israel. But the real war obviously is between Jerusalem and Tehran. And the thing that Trump can do, which the current administration has not done, is to strangle the revolutionary regime in Tehran.

By the time Trump left office, the Iranians were begging for a relief of the sanctions. And they got it under Biden. They got this huge cash flow. And that's, I do think that's, I mean, it's not the only thing. You can't say that, for instance, October 7th wouldn't have happened if Trump had been in. But the cash flow to Iran since the Democrats have been in has definitely helped the regime in Tehran.

And that means it's been able to fund its terror proxies from Lebanon to Gaza to, I mean, even Yemen. So the Yemen, the Houthis in Yemen are able to fire really pretty significant munitions at places like Eilat in the south of Israel.

That's all Iran is doing. Now, I think that Trump, the most likely thing he would do is to do what he did before and is to try to tighten the cordon around the regime in Tehran. That would certainly, if you could stop the Ayatollah's expansionism across the region and unify basically the countries that were part of the Abraham Accords and bring some more into it, there's a definite way to have a better situation in the whole region for everyone.

He could broker that. I mean, he brokered the Abraham Accords, which nobody thought could be done. And if he could add to that, that would be extraordinary. But the main thing is stopping the Ayatollahs from their, I think, absolutely insane actual expansionism. You think they're going to give a shit? Like you think they're going to react because they're going to be like, I'm getting money from, you know, China. I'm getting money from Russia. Yeah.

You're not going to be able to do anything to Iran? You think Iran will react and stop with their proxies? It has rather reacted recently. I mean, if you send hundreds of missiles and munitions that are directly from Iran into Israel, that is kind of horrible, don't you think? I do. No, what I'm saying is you think Iran is at a point right now that they feel if Russia and China have their backs, they're capable of...

Well, I mean, I think the first thing's got to go is if Trump's got a great relationship with Putin and he reacts to Trump, Putin cannot empower, you know, Iran. And if Trump comes in and the tariffs go and he starts challenging them with the Mexico tariffs, with the cars coming up here from, you know, Hafizan, the big plant that they build in Mexico, and they're saving all this money where per hourly labor they're paying in China, $4.75. I think Hafizan in Mexico is $3.95. They're saving money on...

workers in Mexico. So if Trump goes like this to Russia and China, then Iran has no power. If he does that. And if there's anybody capable of doing that, it's him. Yeah, no, that's what I think. I mean, I think that, and I think in any case, as far as the Iranians, I'd be very worried about throwing myself into the arms of the Chinese Communist Party and indeed Vladimir Putin, who are after their own interests. But just, just going back to this quickly, I mean, I, it is, um,

I mean, this obsession with the Israel-Hamaz war in the last year, it's terrible because October 7th was unbelievable. And Hamas, you know, has this trap that it tries to catch Israel into every time, which is, you know, come in and kill our people in order that we can call for the world's attention to be on you as the aggressor. And the world falls for it every time. You know, the intercepted messages...

The Wall Street Journal ran the other week from Sinoir, the architect of the 7th, who's Hamas leader now in Gaza. The phrase, the intercepted messages of his where he talks about how good it is that there are so many casualties in the Gazan population because the Israelis are being blamed for it. Every casualty, in my view, is on Hamas because you're not allowed to start a war and then moan when you lose it.

And every casualty is on Hamas because they could have given back the hostages or not taken them in the first place. The world is very unempathetic when anything happens to Israel, in my view. A wildly lacking in empathy. I remember when, and I think it's something like a belief on the right as well as parts of the left, it's something like a belief that Israel did something that justifies this.

I think that's the sort of root of the problem. And I remember after 9-11, there was an academic in the UK called Mary Beard, the classicist, who said in the London Review of Books that, you know, bad as 9-11 was, it was hard to get out of your head the fact that America had it coming. That was a huge scandal at the time because most of us were like, how dare you?

Even if America had done every single thing that her enemies accused her of, how dare you say that America had the killing of 3,000 civilians in one day coming? Well, I'm as intolerant of that attitude towards the state of Israel as I am towards the republic here. I think it's a reprehensible attitude.

And as for all of the self-taught people who've suddenly mugged up on tiny, tiny corners of Middle Eastern history in the last 11 months, I have yet to find somebody who's to persuade me that if, for instance, thousands and thousands of Americans have been killed on one day and thousands of Americans by proportion of population taken, kidnapped, that America would not be tearing up the earth to get them back. Yeah.

Well, I mean, there's... And that, by the way, it would have the right to do so and that its friends and allies should expect it to do so. Yeah, you know, I understand everybody. I understand everybody's arguments on the side of defending yourself, obviously. I understand those who have family in Palestine and they're sitting there saying, hey, I'm not for this. You're going to thank your family first. I'm fully against any of the proxies that Iran funds as a guy that lived there

And witness what the Hezbollahs did, living there where your women and your family are frightened of walking outside because you may get whipped 77 times in your back for showing a little bit of hair or a little bit of this. Those stories are endless. And I'm for 100% America first being the greatest country in the world. And we got to do our best to make sure we keep it that way. And some of the stuff that's happening right now with us being confused doesn't make me

It concerns me a little bit, but I'm an optimist. I'm a guy that believes future looks bright. I believe the right people will rise up. I think the right people are finding each other. I think we're going in the right direction. I'm always going to be in that state of mind. It's always been more beneficial to be

51% optimistic and thinking the future looks bright and 49% being paranoid that only the paranoid survive. And flirting with that mindset is a little bit confusing at times because sometimes you go too much this way, too much that way, both way, but I'm always going to be more optimistic than anything else. Douglas, appreciate you for coming out. Rob, if you can do me a favor, the event's coming up. Let's put the link below. Miami Beach, that's going to be tomorrow. Tomorrow.

tomorrow the date is the 10th i believe then you're at dc the 11th la 23rd new york 29th denver colorado october 13th rob put the link to all the events below for folks to go see as well as the link to his book that i think people should go check out the war on the west with that being said i'll give you the final words before we finish up no it's a great pleasure to be here finally to meet with um

Got a lot more to go over, it seems. I think we're going to do many, many more of these for many years to come, but I appreciate you for coming on. I appreciate you. Thank you. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye, bye-bye. By the way, a lot of people ask us, how the hell do you guys get all this content, research, AI for your PBD podcast? How do you guys pull all this information out? We worked the last 12 months and hired 15 machine learning guys and built a news aggregator site that we want as a customer. We decided to build that and release it to everybody. And if you've not seen it,

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