The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - April 14, 2026


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Radical Liberation


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

170.6505

Word count

3,810

Sentence count

187

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

25

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics. Now, in this episode, I have the absolute delight of bringing
00:00:28.080 on my good friend radical liberation uh radical liberation thank you for coming on thank you a
00:00:33.140 little bit of uh a little bit of law for people um when i first got into this whole game um actually
00:00:40.040 all started with me speaking at a conference event the witton and and it was radlib who asked the
00:00:45.140 first question of that and was the first guy to come up to me afterwards to say uh broadly oh
00:00:49.500 that was a good talk you you seem to be quite good at this talking thing uh would you consider doing
00:00:54.020 more of it uh and then he got me on a show called unpopular opinions and then uh carl watched a few
00:00:59.740 of those and said oh that's the guy from the conference maybe i should invite him in so that
00:01:03.160 that's how i got into it it was um i did not remember that i had anything to do with that
00:01:07.480 thank you you were there from the very start sir very good very good so and that was the last time
00:01:13.120 i was in england by the way 2020 oh was it oh okay but i think you're coming again in not too
00:01:18.120 long i'm coming coming again in about a month yeah we must get you on the podcast uh when that
00:01:22.640 happens. So yeah, what I wanted to talk to you about is we Brits, we do have to, we forget this
00:01:29.380 often, but America is actually a foreign country. You speak the same language, so it kind of guiles
00:01:36.580 us into forgetting that most of the time. And usually we're so culturally similar that it
00:01:42.640 doesn't really come up. But our two great nations appear to be a little bit divergent at the moment
00:01:48.760 on one or two matters of empire.
00:01:53.380 And I want to kind of get your thoughts
00:01:54.960 on what it's like from the inside.
00:01:59.080 I'm sorry, in regards to Britain?
00:02:01.740 No.
00:02:02.560 Attitudes towards Britain?
00:02:04.140 Yeah, well, I suppose we could go with that.
00:02:07.780 But, you know, what is the sort of mood in the US
00:02:13.840 for, say, the Iran thing recently?
00:02:16.960 because i i get confusing messages on that i i look at fox news and i'm told that 100 right-wing
00:02:23.220 americans uh supported 100 and then i watch msnbc and i'm told that 17 of americans supported or
00:02:30.860 something so i don't and and obviously the right-wing contingent is larger than that so i
00:02:34.660 don't really know what's going on yeah it okay so i did i do have um you know uh contacts throughout
00:02:42.980 the country through an organization I'm a part of running. And some of the word we're getting is
00:02:49.960 that I remember an academic agent said something once. He said, who are the normies now? I often
00:02:56.840 think about that. We're having one of those moments where the kinds of things that we
00:03:01.520 associated with edgy online conversation, just normal people are saying like, oh, well, Israel's
00:03:09.840 in control of american foreign policy obviously you know right uh and that was one of those things
00:03:15.780 this is just like a working man you know but yeah now there's one of those things that you just you
00:03:21.080 just knew not to say because otherwise you'd be banned and you'd be fired and all the rest of it
00:03:25.500 but but now i see it all the time yes absolutely and and the result of this is i i personally
00:03:32.280 believe the more negative polls which are saying that you know the support for this war is somewhere
00:03:38.980 around the level of the last year or two of the Vietnam War, when support had dropped
00:03:44.280 precipitously, right? Except this war is starting there, starting at that horrible level of support
00:03:51.200 and going down from there, right? So I don't think this war has much support. And I have to say,
00:03:56.840 and I don't hear people talk about it much, but let's not forget the context. It's just the last
00:04:02.320 couple of years. I don't know how we can forget except for news cycle brain, what Israel's been 0.97
00:04:07.220 doing in Gaza. Now, the Fox News boomers have been propagandized and filtered in the information
00:04:15.040 they get. And so you've got, you know, 75-year-old Fox News conservatives who that doesn't affect how
00:04:21.360 they're viewing things as much, right? But for everybody that's not a Fox News boomer,
00:04:26.200 all the people who have been seeing the horrible footage coming out of Gaza on TikTok, 0.75
00:04:30.820 Everyone younger than me, they are viewing the Iran war in the context of what Israel's been
00:04:38.060 doing in Gaza for the last couple of years. I think the Iran war, had it been propagandized
00:04:43.300 a bit better, and had Israel not been just doing this, could have been sold a little more with the
00:04:50.340 American public. But as it is, we come into this with a huge black mark over Israel.
00:04:56.820 So I'm kind of fascinated that this war is starting out 0.94
00:04:59.340 as popular as the Vietnamese War started
00:05:01.700 because that cost, I believe, 58,000 US troops.
00:05:05.940 As popular as the Vietnam War's war near the end
00:05:09.040 when it was not popular.
00:05:11.260 But by the end of the Vietnam War,
00:05:12.840 you were down 58,000 troops.
00:05:15.640 58,000 coffins had come home.
00:05:18.680 And obviously the public are just skipping
00:05:20.240 straight ahead of that and saying,
00:05:21.420 well, actually, we don't want the next...
00:05:22.800 Even if it's 10,000,
00:05:24.640 We don't want the next 10,000 coffins coming home.
00:05:27.660 Yeah, yeah.
00:05:28.460 And I've even heard word of dissension in the ranks, shall we say.
00:05:33.160 I'll be careful about what I say there.
00:05:35.120 I don't follow you there.
00:05:38.420 I'm saying that people that are in the military are also not happy with this.
00:05:43.720 Yeah.
00:05:43.920 Right.
00:05:44.560 Okay.
00:05:44.780 So, I mean, one of the things that people talk about is that essentially generational support for Israel is declining quite hard.
00:05:55.760 Yeah, and that's what I wanted to say.
00:05:57.340 It was kind of hard to answer your question in a super simple black and white way because it depends on the demographic, I think.
00:06:05.720 Right. 0.66
00:06:05.960 I think that there are still your boomer conservative, boomer Fox News conservatives who might have over 50 percent support for the Iran war.
00:06:15.780 I could believe it. But under 30 years old, even if you get it to just like conservatives or something like that, there is no way that 50 percent of under 30 year old conservatives support the Iran war.
00:06:28.500 No way. That's not what I'm hearing. So it's very demographic. It's demographically split.
00:06:34.320 yeah i think and and it's not a left versus right thing it's not a republicans versus democrats
00:06:39.460 i'm sure there's some some of that uh because there's always some of that just you know i i
00:06:45.800 support my team i oppose the other team uh so i'm i'm sure if you split it by that's what i'm saying
00:06:51.280 if you split it by sort of the the conservative or republican aligned uh under 30s and the left
00:06:58.280 wing aligned the left wing aligned would be like totally opposed to it i'm just saying even if you
00:07:03.800 put it to like the core, Trump's core, Trump's base, I don't think you're going to get over 50%
00:07:09.000 of support. I think it's going to be under that. It's bad. That's what I'm hearing. It's very,
00:07:14.340 very bad support. And what's happening? I mean, just pulling on the Israel thread for a minute,
00:07:20.320 what's happening to the level of things like AIPAC? Because it would appear that if those AIPAC
00:07:27.820 track of things that I've seen are accurate. Almost everyone is taking money from this
00:07:33.620 organization, apart from Thomas Massey and maybe like three other people.
00:07:37.620 Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, I need to lay my cards on the table so that you understand,
00:07:44.240 the viewers understand where I'm coming from. I oppose the Iraq war. I predicted 9-11. 0.89
00:07:50.540 I've been against like the neocons for decades now. So I am not a neutral observer, but I will
00:07:56.120 try to be realist and give you the straight story as much as I can. What has blown my mind about
00:08:02.820 AIPAC, that is Israel lobby support, is that it was never a mark of shame to accept support from
00:08:11.000 the Israel lobby until the last few years. And now you see candidates saying, oh no, I'm not
00:08:17.500 taking Israel money. Sometimes they're being truthful. There are people who are avoiding 1.00
00:08:22.340 taking Israel money. Other times, they're just having it funneled a different way so it doesn't
00:08:27.220 have the word AIPAC on it or whatever. You know what I mean? So they're still getting Israel
00:08:31.140 lobby money. They're just rebranding it. I don't care. The fact that they are trying to hide it,
00:08:36.980 that's new. We've never had that before. For all these years of the dominance of the Israel lobby,
00:08:43.140 it has somehow been kind of quiet in a way, like not an item of controversy. It is now
00:08:51.060 an item of controversy to take money from the israel lobby that's new and i'm excited as someone
00:08:56.100 who opposes the israel lobby and and how do you think we will you uh how do we think that the us
00:09:02.180 got into this situation in the first place because i i'm not particularly aware that you know any
00:09:08.260 foreign government is trying to bribe on a mass scale british politicians maybe because they're
00:09:13.700 relevant or i don't know what it is but i mean how how did your body politic end up in this situation
00:09:20.580 Well, that's a long story. And quick add, I have a series that I'm still doing on the
00:09:26.140 relationship between the US and Israel. I've called it the specialist relationship,
00:09:30.740 as in special, specialer, specialist. It's obviously a play, Dan, on the special relationship
00:09:37.600 between the US and UK. And I'm like, yeah, but there's one that's even more special.
00:09:41.580 It's even the specialist relationship, the US and Israel. Yeah. And so, you know, in that series,
00:09:47.080 I went through Mearsheimer and Walt's Israel lobby, and then I've covered a number of other
00:09:51.180 aspects. And now I'm working on the nuclear aspect, Israel having nuclear weapons and how
00:09:56.680 that plays into the relationship between the US and Israel. Turns out to be a really significant
00:10:00.460 part of it, actually. The relationship was not so strong right away. You know, though the US
00:10:10.480 under Truman recognized, like the USSR did, recognized Israel immediately in 1948.
00:10:17.020 There was some back and forth. You might remember the Suez crisis.
00:10:21.880 Well, I don't remember it, but I've heard of it.
00:10:23.840 Yeah, you might know about it. Yeah, yeah. And that was a case where the US did not
00:10:29.260 do what Israel wanted to do, famously under Eisenhower. But that was a long time ago.
00:10:34.940 And by the 80s, I would say, the Israel lobby had absolutely consolidated its control of the U.S. empire.
00:10:44.900 And thus we see and thus we see Reagan acting very much having this being surrounded by neocons.
00:10:52.160 Basically, neocons have been surrounding the president starting in the 80s and ever since.
00:10:57.080 They just don't seem to go away, no matter who we vote for, no matter whether it's Republican or Democrat.
00:11:02.440 Their foreign policy advisor is a neocon.
00:11:04.940 etc etc so i i had i suppose i had always been thinking about the neocons as something that
00:11:11.080 overlapped with the israeli lobby but wasn't necessarily the same thing but i mean the way
00:11:15.080 you've implied several times is effectively the same thing yeah i used to uh think of neocons as
00:11:22.220 like um maybe they were sort of a faction and israel wasn't necessarily happy with them
00:11:29.080 I have learned more, and I reject that at this point.
00:11:33.640 There is an international network of Zionists who work together. 0.95
00:11:38.860 Some of them have positions of power in the U.S. government. 0.94
00:11:42.640 Some of them are in Israel.
00:11:43.900 Some of them are in the U.K.
00:11:46.100 There are others who are aligned with them who are, you know, like Tony Blair, as we've, as Academic Agent has just been highlighting. 0.58
00:11:55.160 Tony Blair is a fully signed up member of the Zionist Influence Network.
00:12:00.340 So, you know, it's an international network. 0.71
00:12:02.920 It's very powerful.
00:12:05.020 And the neocons are, you could say, one part of it, but they are part of it.
00:12:10.900 Yes.
00:12:11.660 And what do you think about the theory that I've heard advanced from a number of US influences
00:12:17.260 that effectively the neocons realize that their image is shot
00:12:23.240 And what they're doing is they're kind of pushing this neocon adventure onto Trump, letting him take full ownership of it, let him crash out.
00:12:30.580 And then they can get back to a subtle but clever neocon president like Obama, who basically does all the things they want, but knows how to sell it in a smooth, reassuring voice that could also do nature documentaries, that kind of thing.
00:12:44.940 Right. Yeah. I mean, just in a sardonic praise of Trump for a moment, this is what's so fun about Trump is he just says things.
00:12:53.240 Right. Other presidents would have known not to just say it out, say it when the mic is on, so to speak. Trump does. And he just says, yeah, Miriam Adelson gave me a bunch of money. And so I moved the capital. I moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
00:13:10.920 He just says it.
00:13:11.900 I mean, I can share the clip with you
00:13:13.360 if you haven't seen it, et cetera, et cetera, right?
00:13:15.500 He just, all this stuff that had been smoky brooms
00:13:18.340 and dark conspiracies, Trump just tells us,
00:13:21.360 yeah, that's exactly what's going on.
00:13:22.860 I'm doing this for Israel. 0.97
00:13:24.200 I'm doing this because rich Jewish donors
00:13:26.520 are giving me millions of dollars. 0.94
00:13:28.500 Done, right?
00:13:30.400 Anyway, sorry, I got distracted with that point.
00:13:33.200 What was your question?
00:13:35.260 Yeah, no, the theory was 0.51
00:13:38.300 is that they kind of dump this knowingly unpopular neocon adventure onto him. 0.98
00:13:45.500 And then they're basically going to let him take the fool for it 0.92
00:13:47.600 and then get a smooth-talking Obama-type salesman to do the same thing, 0.97
00:13:51.640 but in a more better delivery.
00:13:54.920 Yeah, okay.
00:13:56.980 I think we should be very careful about confusing people coming up with plans
00:14:04.260 on the fly in the face of changing circumstances with a grand master plan that they planned decades
00:14:10.260 ago or something like that. I don't buy it in this case. As Academic Agent has said,
00:14:15.940 the regime wanted Trump. They got Trump this time, right? Last time they didn't,
00:14:21.140 but this time they did. They wanted Trump to do certain things like launch the Iran war.
00:14:27.460 The Iran war has blown up in their face. I guess they thought they would pull it off,
00:14:31.220 off, but they're not pulling it off. And so now they are pivoting and would like to lay it all
00:14:42.840 on Trump and, well, to segue a little bit, blame Europe and et cetera, et cetera. But they're just
00:14:52.300 running away from the smelly thing and trying to get the smell off them. Our job is to make sure
00:14:57.100 the smell doesn't get off them i i'd love to pivot to the to the europe thing but just just
00:15:01.980 before we do yeah yeah um yeah we know that trump just says stuff right but but rubio doesn't just
00:15:09.080 say things he is a he is a politician in the classic mold and yet he linked the operation
00:15:16.000 very very clearly to israel um do you think that he he just had a he just had an off day he didn't
00:15:23.900 get enough sleep that night and he just misspoke or was that a very deliberate subtle message that
00:15:30.560 he put in there yeah and i'm sorry the name has left my mind cook or no wait who's the guy who
00:15:36.500 just can't joe kent and joe kent was extremely uh explicit about this in his resignation letter
00:15:42.740 as well right um yeah are you're basically saying why would rubio say that well it i mean
00:15:51.220 we've mentioned academic agent a number of times he's got this sort of theory that the the deep
00:15:57.520 state or at least an element of the deep state has decided right but this no longer works for
00:16:02.000 the us and they're basically trying to sever ties and perhaps rubio's misspeaking um is is part of
00:16:09.480 that because actually rubio is not the sort of guy who does misspeak yeah he's more careful with
00:16:15.160 his words. I don't know. Again, I try not to talk about things that I don't know. I think it's fun
00:16:22.580 to entertain AA's theory, as he calls it, his cope theory, that the deep state is secretly 0.92
00:16:29.520 working against big Zio. The play there would be just to shrink the Zionist influence down 0.80
00:16:38.420 so that it's a little more like the influence of France or England on American foreign policy,
00:16:44.040 as opposed to what it is now, this dominant thing, right?
00:16:47.900 They want them to be at the table, but not dominating the table, right?
00:16:51.400 That would be the idea.
00:16:52.640 Does France or Britain have any influence on US policy?
00:16:56.180 Say it again?
00:16:57.220 Does France or Britain have any influence on US foreign policy?
00:17:00.760 I'm not aware of any.
00:17:02.060 Well, right, exactly.
00:17:04.140 Even when I said that, it implies a balance that isn't even there, right?
00:17:08.620 Because basically, if Israel cares about it, then you get nothing. 0.71
00:17:14.040 right? So if the UK wants something and Israel wants the opposite, Israel's going to get it. 0.76
00:17:19.420 I would think the influence would be in the spaces in between where Israel doesn't care 0.84
00:17:23.660 one way or the other. Okay, we can give that to the UK, right? But Israel trumps. Israel's the 0.67
00:17:30.220 trump card right now, for sure. You mentioned Suis a moment ago, and the US didn't get involved 0.91
00:17:37.460 in that. But of course, I mean, what Suis really did is that was the moment where two former great
00:17:43.060 power. Well, one form of great power and a secondary power, Britain and France, who had
00:17:50.080 been dominant on the world stage in the previous century, were demonstrated to be unable to enforce
00:17:57.700 their will over a waterway in the Middle East. I think I see where you're going. And before you
00:18:05.140 go there, let's talk about the other thing that already happened, right? Right now, the world
00:18:11.860 attention is focused on the Strait of Hormuz, but the Houthis have been controlling, and I'm sorry,
00:18:18.440 what's the area? There's a passageway that they're controlling, right? They've been controlling that
00:18:26.560 for a couple of years, very similar to what Iran is now doing, where they're saying, you can come
00:18:31.460 through if you negotiate with us, otherwise, you know, we'll bomb you, right? Well, we'll bomb your 0.99
00:18:36.880 ship. Well, the Houthis have already been doing that for a couple of years. So to me, I think 1.00
00:18:41.860 this is sort of the lagging indicator, what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz. This is
00:18:46.100 everybody seeing what I was noticing a couple of years ago, which is that, you know, one of the
00:18:53.360 justifications for the U.S. empire, and I've heard this from a former co-host of mine, in fact, on my
00:18:58.240 channel, he said, well, look, you may not like the U.S. empire for various reasons, but at least it
00:19:03.360 keeps trade going. It keeps the waterways going. It's a naval power. You've got to keep the lanes
00:19:10.200 of shipping open. Is that Black Horse Bunny, John? No, no, no, no, no. A former co-host, 1.00
00:19:15.900 not my current co-host. Mad Mercenary from Australia. So he laid great emphasis on that
00:19:23.840 aspect of the US empire. And he says, well, at least they do that. Well, with the Houthis,
00:19:28.860 they already failed at that a couple of years ago. And so I remember thinking at the time,
00:19:33.360 well, it's the beginning of the end. If the US empire cannot keep the waterways open,
00:19:39.380 then its role will diminish. Not all at once, obviously. Everybody was like,
00:19:46.960 the US empire is over tomorrow. No, it isn't. It's going to shrink slowly, right? But it is
00:19:52.480 the beginning of the decline, right? So this is now the second waterway that they're losing control
00:19:58.040 love with the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah. And I mean, I mean, it was literally the reason why the whole
00:20:03.460 world is using the dollar at the moment. It's because of, oh, I forget the treaty now, but
00:20:09.760 Bretton Woods, it was essentially, we will keep the waterways open and secure around the world.
00:20:15.180 And in exchange, you will do all global transactions based on the dollar,
00:20:18.840 which then enables the US to run an enormous deficit, which means it can then run a much
00:20:24.360 larger military than it otherwise would which becomes a self-reinforcing loop which kind of
00:20:29.920 hit its peak for the gulf war that i presume that that's probably something like peak u.s power
00:20:36.100 uh and then ever since then i mean and the thing that stuck out to me was the retreat from 0.63
00:20:41.200 afghanistan recently because that was utterly shambolic yes and the only thing yeah the only
00:20:47.440 thing i could say for that is is is thank god it was biden doing it because then you've got a kind 0.96
00:20:52.280 of ready excuse because he was such a hapless figure that you could say yes the retreat from
00:20:56.740 afghanistan was humiliating however we can push it on biden and i remember saying on the podcast
00:21:02.460 at the time the u.s wants to be careful that it does not have any more high profile military
00:21:08.420 setbacks or military defeats in the near future coming closely after afghanistan because you
00:21:15.240 won't be able to blame the next one on biden yeah and if you start getting a couple of these
00:21:21.280 racking up and then basically everybody is going to be thinking okay well one where do i get my
00:21:26.460 security guarantees from what military equipment do i buy and what currency do i trade in and once
00:21:33.140 that dollar loop starts to unwind well the deficits go away the deficit spending goes away the military
00:21:40.080 goes away because something like something like 75 of us spending is welfare payments and pretty
00:21:48.720 much all of that is federally mandated. The bit that isn't federally mandated is the military
00:21:54.680 spending. So if the deficit goes away, US spending becomes basically 100% welfare payments and 0%
00:22:01.860 military. If you enjoyed that content, and of course you did because you are a smart person,
00:22:07.160 then why don't you go over to lotuseaters.com where you can watch the whole episode for as
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00:22:16.880 And you get loads of really good content.