Yossi Gestetner joins us to talk about the U.S. decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and the reaction to it, and why we should have left a long time ago. We also discuss the impact on the economy, the stock market, and inflation.
00:00:22.000First and foremost, I have long maintained, as have many other libertarian personality types, even some conservatives and many Democrats, have always said it was a disaster to be in there in the first place.
00:01:15.000Well, Biden came back briefly to give a speech.
00:01:19.000And actually, a lot of people are saying good things about it.
00:01:21.000And it's kind of ironic because of all the things you could give credit to Joe Biden for, the last thing I thought anybody would praise him for was speaking.
00:01:37.000Pass this off to the next administration?
00:01:39.000Although it was... He didn't... He tried to take responsibility, but also blamed Trump and blamed Afghanistan, so... Alright, I'm not gonna say too much.
00:01:49.000We're gonna get into all that and we'll talk about it.
00:01:51.000China's reaction has been... I would say this is...
00:02:47.000I live up in New York and I've been a political commentator in the Jewish community in New York going back all the way to 2005 as a written columnist on a weekly basis and also on a podcast through a phone system.
00:03:02.000Believe it or not, there are tens of thousands of observant Jewish people who do not have access to the Internet at home.
00:03:09.000So they rely on a comprehensive phone system, which would serve as a podcast for news, information, entertainment.
00:03:17.000And I've been blessed to be a commentator there going back to 2007.
00:03:20.000And of course, I like to be active on Twitter a couple of hours a day, too much.
00:03:28.000But I think, you know, Twitter is an interesting place to debate people, to hear ideas and to get a message out there.
00:03:36.000So that's what I do in the political arena in terms of commentary.
00:03:43.000It kind of feels like a mix between Christmas night, and we're celebrating this whole Iraq pullout thing, and September 11th, 2001.
00:03:52.000I was in New York, and after the buildings came down, we all got together out and had lunch, and it was like the most dazing, disorienting, chaotic feeling.
00:04:01.000And I kind of feel like a mix between that and Christmas right now with this Iraq thing.
00:04:13.000It is a good point because on the one hand I think people are glad to see that the U.S.
00:04:17.000is moving on from Afghanistan in terms of having boots on the ground, but the images being a complete disaster is something which will live in infamy.
00:04:28.000So I think that's the contradiction between being a joyous time and a concerning time.
00:04:34.000There's also some interesting media stuff and media manipulation stuff I noticed in the changes to the Wikipedia entries to the Taliban, which I think have political significance, so we'll talk about that too.
00:05:44.000You'll get a 60-day money-back guarantee.
00:05:46.000You'll get the healthy aging support of collagen in its ideal forms, the five key types that you need from four different sources.
00:05:53.000Hydrolyzed collagen peptides, meaning better and faster digestibility to support maximum benefits.
00:05:59.000For every order today, Biotrust will donate a nutritious meal to a hungry child in your honor through their partnership with NoKidHungry.org.
00:06:05.000To date, Biotrust has provided over 5 million meals to hungry kids.
00:06:09.000Please help Biotrust hit their goal of 6 million meals this year.
00:06:33.000First of all, free shipping, but you also get free VIP live health and fitness coaching from BioTrust's team of expert nutrition and health coaches for life with every order and their free e-report, The 14 Foods for Amazing Skin with Every Order.
00:06:47.000BioTrust, thank you so much for sponsoring the show.
00:06:49.000Go to strongerbonesandlife.com and you'll get 51% off.
00:06:52.000But don't forget, go to timcast.com, be a member.
00:06:54.000We got a whole bunch of amazing journalism, and we're gonna have a bonus segment, members-only segment, coming up around 11 p.m.
00:07:05.000Before we get started, again, just smash that like button, subscribe to the channel, share it with your friends.
00:07:09.000That does it for our introductory plugs.
00:07:12.000Let's talk about what's going on in Afghanistan.
00:07:13.000And the first thing I want to address is I was shocked by the news.
00:07:20.000When Joe Biden started giving his speech, and I was watching it, I was shocked to see how many people were actually praising him.
00:07:27.000I mean, notably, my friend Cassandra Fairbanks, when she said it was a good speech.
00:07:31.000Not that it's absolving him of responsibility, of his failures, but at the very least, look, I gotta say this.
00:07:37.000He said a few things I really did like.
00:07:39.000And I think the important thing about it, why I'm going to say thank you for saying these things, notably, We can't send Americans to fight a war the Afghans are not willing to fight themselves.
00:07:49.000We were not supposed to be nation building in Afghanistan.
00:07:52.000We cannot pass this on to the next president and we can't send another generation of our men and women in uniform to go into this Quagmire, this waste of money, those are good things because it vindicates a lot of the anti-war positions of Democrats, Conservatives, Libertarians, basically everybody who have been saying the same thing.
00:08:09.000Finally, you get the President to come out and say it.
00:08:11.000That doesn't mean he's done a particularly good job with the withdrawal.
00:08:14.000In fact, a lot of people are kind of shocked at how bad and disastrous it was.
00:08:19.000Surprisingly, you know, as I said earlier, I said in the intro, the one thing that he's getting praise for is the one thing probably no one ever expected, actually speaking.
00:08:27.000To be fair, though, not everybody is giving him praise.
00:08:29.000A lot of people are saying that it was a mixed bag.
00:08:47.000But, you know, with that, I can respect that we're getting out of Afghanistan.
00:08:52.000Rossi, you had similar tweets, I think.
00:08:55.000Yeah, the point that I'm trying to make over the past 36 hours is, you know, people were pushing around blame on the withdrawal.
00:09:02.000I don't think the debate is if the US should leave or not.
00:09:06.000The question is why abandon the place?
00:09:10.000Again, most of my commentary over the last 16 years has been on Politics here at home, economics, and the politics of politics.
00:09:18.000Like, I wouldn't say that I have expertise in the military field, but just, you know, following a little bit with people trying to push around blame between Trump and Biden, you know, everyone says, well, Trump had a plan to leave.
00:09:35.000Okay, so does a plan to leave mean that we'll have this disaster?
00:09:39.000My guess is that if Trump were president and the Taliban were advancing over the last few weeks, he would pop off 10 tweets a day, tell them one more step these guys are making will drone them and he would probably unleash hellfires on them too, hellfire missiles.
00:09:54.000They will probably stop the advancement.
00:10:25.000The problem here is not the withdrawal, it's abandoning the place.
00:10:28.000As I said, if Trump were in, I think we would probably see from him dozens of tweets every day, going back a couple of weeks, warning them that one, you know, if they go one more kilometer, he'll smoke them, and he would probably smoke some of these guys, and they would stop.
00:12:20.000with a couple of thousands of troops on the ground was able to hold back the Taliban from May till now.
00:12:26.000Which means they are probably, they were probably able to do that going forward with some sort of a, not even a contingent of troops, but again drones.
00:12:34.000Or just being there saying we are going to defend this government and don't you dare make any moves.
00:12:39.000I think people would listen as they did.
00:12:41.000I think the main issue is that it's Biden.
00:12:45.000You know, look, obviously the Taliban, China, all these other countries, China's making fun of us.
00:13:20.000So I think with Trump, like you're right, he would have been tweeting like a madman.
00:13:23.000And I definitely think for better or for worse, Trump was viewed by a lot of people around the world with disdain and fear because he was kind of erratic.
00:13:35.000He was kind of, he was extremely arrogant and aggressive.
00:13:38.000And so you had this, this, you know, it's kind of a negative of character, right?
00:13:42.000But when you, when you realize what that means for the Taliban, they're thinking, this guy's insane.
00:14:05.000Again, I haven't spoken to him, but just I guess the way he behaved.
00:14:09.000So what I'm saying is withdrawing with this disaster just means, as China said, you know, that people in Hong Kong or Taiwan, whatever, should know that the U.S.
00:14:21.000We've been saying that about Taiwan for a minute.
00:14:23.000That with the escalation of rhetoric, with China sent in aircraft into the Taiwanese defense airspace, I'm saying Biden's gonna do nothing.
00:14:33.000I mean, Mark Milley, I think, is too weak.
00:14:36.000But let me ask you, who has airtight for it?
00:15:06.000You don't think Trump would have lost his mind and sent in a bunch of military?
00:15:10.000I think there was a smaller chance of China doing something against Taiwan with Trump than it is with Biden or someone else.
00:15:18.000But again, I'm not making any military predictions.
00:15:21.000I'm saying if you look at China the last 20, 30 years, their main objective around the globe, I think they even have a deal with, they had a deal with Afghanistan or Pakistan.
00:15:30.000I think they're announcing support for the Taliban.
00:15:33.000They have support all over the place and in the US, most people weren't even with Trump on the issue of balancing out tariffs and import and export.
00:15:47.000I want to pull up Biden's speech because I think as much as we can be happy that he said things, we got to call out the criticism and we got to hold him to his word, right?
00:15:56.000So let me just read a couple of things he said.
00:15:59.000When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.
00:16:10.000forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in the country, and the Taliban was at its strongest military since 2001.
00:16:19.000The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
00:17:20.000If Biden wants to come out and say these things that are going to be ear candy to people who are anti-war, I want to see him actually put up and follow through and then Yeah, I mean, the U.S.
00:17:29.000has, what, 25,000 troops in the Korean Peninsula, and so if Biden's stance is that the country locally isn't willing to put up a fight and therefore we should leave, then I guess the U.S.
00:17:53.000That's why I don't think it's serious.
00:17:54.000I think what happened is they inherited this deal, and I think they hate that they did.
00:18:00.000I think, you know, if Trump didn't negotiate the withdrawal because the American people wanted it, I guess what was it, like Trump came in on like day three or whatever and told all his people, we're getting out of Afghanistan, we're done with this.
00:18:23.000They extended the timeline by three months, clearly did not use that three months for planning.
00:18:28.000Because the question everybody has is, why didn't they disable the American military equipment?
00:18:33.000Why didn't they blow it up or burn it or destroy Because they didn't do it all these months because they were under the illusion that Afghan military is a legit force and they'll use it.
00:18:46.000But I think, but the counter-argument to that is, okay, that's why they didn't blow it up two or three weeks ago, but why not over the last few days just blow everything up if you're anyway dealing with a bunch of clowns, you know?
00:18:57.000Yeah, the Taliban doesn't have an air force.
00:20:07.000Normally, they'll use nanothermite to decommission vehicles when they're not using them anymore.
00:20:11.000It's a military-grade incendiary that'll melt the vehicle from the inside.
00:20:15.000But in this case, it's like, hey, now they have some vehicles that we can figure out how to destroy by building new weapons, and now we can Let's fund Lockheed to do that.
00:20:27.000The political manipulation of information.
00:20:30.000This morning, when I was reading about the news and just going over general fact-checking and stuff, I came across... I was fairly certain I was reading somewhere on Wikipedia that the Taliban was estimated in 2017 to have 200,000 soldiers, which is a massive number.
00:20:48.000And that means there was a massive increase in the size of the Taliban during the Obama-Biden administration.
00:20:54.000Specifically, because their numbers were substantially lower around 2008 or so.
00:20:59.000So they went up from like, you know, 18,000 to 50,000 to 200,000 by 2017.
00:21:02.000Well, that would imply that Donald Trump, before he came in office, inherited this, inherited this conflict in Afghanistan that was untenable.
00:21:58.000Well, in my opinion, it changes responsibility.
00:22:02.000If you're saying that in 2014 there were 60,000 Taliban, You're basically implying that under Donald Trump, the Taliban massively grew in size.
00:22:13.000Yet when you Google search it, it said 2017.
00:22:34.000I don't know if you guys, what your thoughts are on the numbers.
00:22:38.000Yeah, I don't know who keeps count on the Taliban count, on Taliban numbers.
00:22:43.000If it's intelligence community, they were saying a couple of days ago that Kabul can hold Taliban push for 90 days and it held like for 90 minutes, 90 hours.
00:22:55.000Isn't it crazy to think that they have 200,000, though?
00:22:57.000I'm wondering if they changed the way that they measure who's in the Taliban or not, like they do with the census.
00:23:03.000Like how Obama did when he started killing civilians.
00:23:06.000Right, like it could be any non-American supporter.
00:23:09.000I saw a tweet, I think, I forgot who it was, he said that any red tape, any refugee red tape from Afghanistan needs to be removed and we need to welcome in refugees.
00:23:21.000So I wrote, what's the process for the U.S.
00:23:23.000to protect against former Taliban members who will then claim they're refugees?
00:23:29.000has a database, database of exactly everyone who was part of the Taliban.
00:23:34.000So I think a lot of these numbers, whether they're more or less, I think it's just guesses, estimates, which if it's from the intelligence community, it's potentially flawed, as we have seen many things that they estimate about Afghanistan being totally flawed.
00:23:50.000So the source for the Wikipedia that says 200,000 is in January.
00:23:57.000Al Jazeera, The Taliban Explained, they say on the 25th of July 2021 and updated on August 15th, they mention, scroll right down, The group is believed to have 85,000 full-time fighters across the country and exert control over more than half of the country's roughly 400 districts.
00:24:14.000Why isn't this article, which is newer, used as the source on Wikipedia?
00:25:06.000But again, who is looking at Afghanistan as a project through the perspective of whether it's Obama or not?
00:25:14.000I think the average person who follows the news Zooms out for a moment says you know what's 20 years have been many presidents and even Biden, you know Biden didn't come in as someone saving the day He was a senator for I don't know how many years that Afghanistan was going on and then he was vice president So he wasn't an onlooker.
00:25:34.000So I think Typical person who follows the news a little bit thinks of Afghanistan as a total mess all around.
00:25:42.000This party, that party, it doesn't matter.
00:25:44.000It's like it's a mess and I think people are left scratching their heads.
00:25:47.000Okay, we had there only two and a half thousand soldiers there for a while now and the peace held.
00:25:53.000So what happened now that everything went to hell in a handbasket?
00:25:58.000I think just from a practical perspective, not necessarily political, people would want to wonder that, rather than exactly when it went up or down.
00:26:06.000Might be it was costing us $40 billion a year recently, up to now, like a couple trillion since we went in, $2 trillion I think, so maybe it's just like bankrupt times because of COVID.
00:26:18.000I gotta say, I really love the meme posts where it's like, the school children in Afghanistan and all of these establishment Dems are like, these poor school children now can't go to school and the girls are running home and then someone comments none of them are wearing masks.
00:26:34.000Like, where's the priority for Afghanistan for these kids or whatever?
00:26:37.000Not that I think that's actually the main priority.
00:28:14.000Will they remember the few days of crisis now, or will they say, oh, you know what, we were there for 20 years, now we're gone and everything's good?
00:28:21.000I think it's going to be real negative.
00:28:23.000I think it's going to be a smear on the Biden administration in a very, very bad way for him.
00:28:28.000I think it's going to be used by Republicans relentlessly.
00:28:31.000But I do think a lot of regular people are going to say both parties were involved.
00:28:50.000They didn't like him when he was president.
00:28:52.000And even now, you've got the established Republicans, you've got the populist Republicans making up a smaller batch of those running in 2022.
00:28:59.000Ultimately, I think we can look back to 2000s.
00:29:02.000We can look back to all the mistakes that were made.
00:29:04.000I think in the end, a lot of people are just going to say, I'm glad it's over with, but we're going to see a lot of news about what's going to be happening in Afghanistan after this.
00:29:12.000It's going to be, you know, women are already wearing burkas, like literally a day later.
00:29:17.000And you see all the women, you even have the reporters.
00:29:20.000You know, Kalisar Ward from CNN, she's wearing the burka now.
00:29:23.000She is saying that the meme isn't correct, that she made this dramatic change.
00:29:26.000She always wore a headscarf, but now she's wearing the more serious one.
00:29:29.000Yeah, she wrote she's wearing something more.
00:29:31.000And as I wrote on Twitter, you know, it's interesting how some reporters, I'm not saying she specifically, they have the self-proclaimed guts to go after the pro-religious states here in the U.S., but when they're overseas, they respect religion.
00:29:46.000or whatever you know if you want to respect religion on whichever level it is then you know you should do that do that at home too and not pile on to indiana or texas or what have you i think in the coming months we are gonna see some really awful imagery out of afghanistan uh... i think A lot of people in the establishment are going to try and use it to justify why we should have stayed, why we shouldn't have withdrawn.
00:30:10.000And I think a lot of people... I think it's going to... Actually, I take that back.
00:30:14.000What I want to say is I think there's going to be news available, but I wonder if the media is actually going to show it because it will reflect extremely poorly on Joe Biden.
00:30:22.000Whether you believe it's his fault or not, he's the president and people are going to say the Biden administration and Afghanistan.
00:30:29.000I think it's going to be really bad for him.
00:30:31.000What we don't have is a lot of video of the war itself, which we had in Vietnam was all the video on the ground with the troops, dudes getting their legs blown apart, guys, you know, screaming for their mother and falling down on punji sticks.
00:31:05.000But relative to Vietnam, after Vietnam, they realized we got to stop putting our media on the ground with the troops because they're seeing too much of the horror and we're not going to get our wars if we do.
00:32:08.000figured after World War II that they need to stay long term in many of these places.
00:32:15.000I don't think things were perfect the day after the war.
00:32:18.000Probably there were some casualties and issues.
00:32:21.000So, from a policy perspective, if the U.S.
00:32:24.000was able to keep the peace relatively okay with just a few thousand troops, not even being so active on the ground, what's the problem with that?
00:32:33.000I mean, you still have troops today in Germany, obviously not because to keep the peace there, but just it illustrates the point where For many years, East Germany and West, the Berlin Wall came up in 1960 or the late 1950s.
00:32:47.000It wasn't right after World War II, which finished in 1945.
00:32:52.000So obviously, any place where things are so rocky and so destructive, it probably takes many, many years to have some sort of an outside peacekeeping force or something.
00:33:04.000So I understand people became tired from Afghanistan, but considering that the U.S.
00:33:09.000kept the peace there now with such a small amount of troops, why jump now?
00:33:41.000Biden said he thought that he can't go back on the deal?
00:33:45.000Yeah, because it would just mean the Taliban is massively powerful and we don't have enough troops to actually stage combat, so we better just get them out.
00:34:25.000Can't they provide for their own defense?
00:34:26.000Yeah, so in terms of, if being in Afghanistan, the issue of being there was mostly a monetary decision, then what about whatever amount of thousands of troops in Korea or in Europe?
00:34:59.000On the one hand, if you look at the war after Korea in the 1950-1953, or you look at Europe after 1945, the US has troops on the ground till today.
00:35:37.000The idea there was, stop the expansion of communism.
00:35:41.000I'm not saying I agree with any of that stuff, but I don't know what would have happened.
00:35:44.000The idea, I suppose, to try and play devil's advocate would be, if you don't stop the spread of communism, and they keep taking more and more countries, eventually it'll be impossible to stop the rise of this authoritarian system that murders hundreds of millions.
00:37:32.000It looks real, but I just can't believe it.
00:37:35.000There is a man in uniform with a bunch of Afghan security forces doing jumping jacks, and one guy can't figure out how to do a single jumping jack.
00:37:43.000You jump, and you clap your hands, and you put your hands down, and he's like, going like this, and he's shuffling around.
00:37:49.000The military guy, he looks like an American soldier, just like...
00:38:46.000Someone said something about, there was like a mythology that some of the farmers had, because they didn't know anything about politics or worldly affairs.
00:38:53.000And so when the troops were coming, they thought it was to like fight dragons in the mountains or something like that.
00:38:59.000I mean, North Korea has been telling their public for many years that the rice and whatever food that the U.S.
00:39:04.000is sending is to compensate for the war in the 50s.
00:39:08.000You never know what local governments tell their people.
00:39:13.000I just, I saw that video and I'm like, we should have left a long time ago.
00:40:33.000So one of the big mistakes, I guess, the US and the contractors made is there was no culture.
00:40:39.000The only culture that existed was people who live in Afghanistan and then say, what should I do, Americans?
00:40:45.000Like basically just deferring to them.
00:40:47.000With the Americans gone, they're like, we don't know what we have or what we're fighting for or why.
00:40:51.000Maybe there is no national pride and national unity there.
00:40:56.000It's just things all over the map on a sectarian basis.
00:41:02.000People who are, you know, Shia Muslims or Sunni Muslims.
00:41:09.000Many of the countries around the world, you know, were created, when was it, 70, 80 years ago, based on religious lines more than anything.
00:41:20.000It's because you didn't have any national pride, if you will.
00:41:49.000I see these people running and trying to get on airplanes to leave this country, and I'm like, why wouldn't they stay and fight for their country?
00:41:56.000Because they have nothing to believe in.
00:41:58.000There's no great story of the evil that they triumphed over.
00:42:01.000There's no great tale of revolution, how the people chose their will.
00:42:05.000It's just literally, the US came here, told us what to do, and I'm going to school.
00:42:10.000And now it's like, oh, with the Taliban coming back in?
00:42:13.000I'll just leave, because there's no reason for me to stay here.
00:42:17.000It's almost like all America was able to do was to create a hollow shell of a country, or at least what they thought was a country, I guess.
00:42:25.000There are stories now of... But the challenge is, I mean, obviously the people who joined the Taliban do feel something for Afghanistan.
00:42:33.000Obviously the Mujahideen back in the 80s who fought back Russia felt for Afghanistan.
00:45:28.000I wonder if that's nutrition, if these people are like, from an era of really bad food and water, and they just don't have the intellect.
00:45:36.000I don't think it's food and water, I think it's, these are older guys, they look like they're probably in their late 20s to 30s, and they've never lived in this world.
00:45:47.000Like, imagine if someone came to you right now, Ian, and said, you know, they wanted you to be a boxer.
00:45:52.000Someone would be like, okay, do it, show me your jab, you'd be like, Yeah, do a dance step, and then they show you the dance step real quick.
00:46:02.000Imagine since you're 10 years old, I don't know how old you are now, but let's say you're 30, and since you're 10 years old, Canada has troops roaming the streets, and the local government is aligned with Canada.
00:46:48.000And so you had peace, and you had... Stability, yeah.
00:46:51.000Stability out of fear, but not out of people reaching that conclusion for their country.
00:46:58.000And if your local government were to be in power because the Canadians, who are here for 20 years, just to make the... That's a funny thought!
00:47:08.000But again, stop a moment and every intersection is now a checkpoint of Canadian soldiers.
00:47:13.000The day they're out, have a nice day, bye-bye.
00:47:16.000And you don't want to be on their side, you don't want to be associated with anyone in the government.
00:47:21.000And in fact, the minute the people in the government, they were propped up by Canada, here's that Canada's leaving, I'm out, I'm not here either.
00:47:56.000these pop culture references because people back. Oh yeah I remember that episode. Oh yeah. So what do you think's
00:48:00.000going to happen. The Americans are leaving. So that's what I'm
00:48:03.000saying. If we think of everything through the prism of you know Trump Biden Republicans Democrats the independent
00:48:10.000you know the independent thinking people versus the machine. I
00:48:14.000think it misses the basic you know try to put yourself in the shoes of a 30 year old Afghani who since he is 10
00:48:21.000years old he is he remembers a foreign force.
00:48:25.000Sometimes he has good memories of them because they played ball, handed out candies, and then he remembers his father at the dinner, you know, cursing away.
00:49:29.000In a statement from the Global Times, which is Chinese state media, basically the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, from what happened in Afghanistan, those in Taiwan should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island's defense will collapse in hours and the U.S.
00:50:13.000Think tanks, which institution in the U.S.
00:50:16.000has patience for wars to protect other countries?
00:50:22.000Especially when there's so many people in the U.S., again institutions in the U.S., who didn't have even, who didn't have the appetite to take on China even on trade.
00:51:29.000And we have allies in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific.
00:51:34.000And it's a huge threat if China starts attacking them and the US would need to defend them.
00:51:38.000However, I don't think anybody, you're right, has an appetite for war.
00:51:42.000But I don't think you need to have an appetite for war if you have a president and administration strong enough to just set that boundary that can't be crossed.
00:51:49.000And I certainly think, as I stated with the Taliban and what we're seeing now, you look at the economic crisis, you look at the... What did Joe Biden just do?
00:53:01.000was so heavily involved in these two countries over the last two decades at a steep cost to the country in terms of soldiers dying or being wounded and you have families
00:53:16.000suffering and people don't even know to what end, to accomplish what. So people just
00:53:49.000So if people don't have the appetite to fight for their country, I'm not saying with people, you know, tweeting for their country, people think that's considered fighting, you know, standing up to Trump, tweeting for their country.
00:54:07.000That's why I wonder, we ask this question of a lot of people, you know, is the culture war a product of America's enemies?
00:54:14.000Sowing divisions online, I mean, we heard all the reports of, you know, Russian interference and how Russia had been running different sides of the culture war, so the impact was microscopic, first and foremost, but what they would do is These these Internet trolls would create a Black Lives Matter Facebook page and then like an anti-Black Lives Matter page and then they would organize protests around each other so that those conflicts could happen.
00:54:39.000Granted, it doesn't seem like they had a tremendous impact, but when I look at what's happening in the US, The... I mean, how about this?
00:55:01.000You look at Afghanistan, no social cohesion, no national identity, and they just collapse.
00:55:06.000No cultural identity, except for the Taliban, of course, and they sweep in like that because they've got a passion for their cause.
00:55:12.000Now you look at what's happening with the 1619 Project, Wokeness, Critical Race, Applied Principles, and you have an entire faction of people who don't like this country.
00:55:27.000He did a, uh, census data came out and it shows that for the first time the white population has shrunk and the audience starts busting out clapping and cheering.
00:55:35.000And then he looks like, why are you, like, what?
00:55:38.000I didn't watch the whole show, but I saw that clip, and it was... Why were they clapping for that?
00:55:43.000Probably 80% of the audience was white.
00:56:10.000But how about we all agree that China is a major threat and we can rally around defending the people of Taiwan, or standing up for them, or having a cohesive message of, you know, we will defend our allies.
00:56:34.000Ragging on people based on their race or gender or just self-loathing and hating themselves.
00:56:40.000I'm not... But I think many people who, you know, supposedly are self-loathing based on their racial or ethnic background, I think a lot of it is not real.
00:56:50.000I think it's just a genre to get retweets or to get attention.
00:57:49.000We have China, we have Russia, we have Iran, Venezuela.
00:57:52.000But then we are so partisan these days that people would take positions on foreign policy based on which president can get more credit or more hits over the head, figuratively speaking.
00:58:03.000What I'm saying is, going back to the 70s and the 80s, people were scared from the USSR at the time.
00:58:13.000I think the minds of people were busy with the well-being of the U.S.
00:58:18.000But I think we live for a generation already in a situation where there's a lot of peace and a lot of prosperity.
00:58:35.000Yeah, but people don't feel it this way the last 20-30 years.
00:58:40.000So you have a whole generation, our generation, being raised spoiled brats.
00:58:45.000And we have the world at our fingertips.
00:58:47.000And then we see people writing interesting articles and they get the retweets and the likes and they get invited on TV and they want in on it.
00:58:55.000It's a shame because so much of this energy can be used Can be used on bringing people together on concerns that are legitimate.
00:59:03.000Concerns about, take the issue of police brutality that's very popular in the liberal field.
00:59:12.000I think at this day and age, I think a lot of people will admit that there are reforms that can be had in law enforcement.
00:59:18.000but if you make everything a racial issue when there are multiple incidents of police officers who are minority physically abusing fellow minorities then obviously the issue of the issues of challenges and law enforcement is not exclusively or not only or not primarily race-based so why are you making it about race when I think there needs to be some overall who gets hired how they're hired the training I mean, your standard police officer, again, I'm not picking on police officers as the individual, talking about the training.
00:59:51.000They can sometimes pull over someone in the afternoon, sitting there with the family.
01:00:12.000Something is wrong with training a police officer that they can go this crazy this quick against a person who is otherwise a civilian.
01:00:20.000And then there's also a lack of accountability in law enforcement.
01:00:25.000I'm not saying now the wall of blue silence or whatever else it's called.
01:00:28.000It's just, you know, it's who is accountable to whom.
01:00:33.000So a lot of these things I think lead to challenges in how to police a community.
01:00:40.000So rather than people coming together, law enforcement and civilians, people from all backgrounds to pass laws and rules how to make things better, The whole conversation gets hijacked about race.
01:00:52.000And once you do that, you lose half the country.
01:00:54.000And that's why, again, let me just wrap it up with this.
01:00:56.000And that's why we're debating today, in 2021, the same issues of police brutality that we did 20, 30 years ago without much change.
01:01:05.000I think we're missing cohesive suffering as a society.
01:01:10.000Or suffering, or worry, or concern, such as you had with Russia.
01:02:49.000In other words, I understand the drive that people have, you know, to get... No, but what I'm saying is the only thing they'll see is that.
01:03:03.000You got a 10-year-old kid, he goes on Facebook for the first time, and 50 adults are sharing police brutality for retweets, for shares.
01:03:10.000That kid will see nothing but police brutality.
01:03:13.00010 years later, say they're born in 2010, or let's say they're born in 2000, they're 10 years old in 2010, they get on Twitter or whatever, they're not supposed to, they're too young, but they do anyway, they see endless streams of police brutality for a decade.
01:03:23.000Then they're 20 going, why won't anyone do anything about this?
01:03:27.000And it's like, bro, turn off the phone and go outside, it's not happening!
01:03:41.000Things are not sometimes as bad as people think, as you said.
01:03:47.000The videos of a police officer playing basketball with a couple of kids is not going to get so much attention as a police officer doing something bad.
01:03:59.000I was gonna say, there's similar criticism to go to, in today's sense, with Antifa violence and BLM riots and stuff.
01:04:08.000Footage that gets recycled over and over and over again because it plays well.
01:04:12.000But, I would say that tendency is more the exception and not the rule because the media mostly ignores it and it doesn't play well.
01:04:19.000It doesn't play well... Yeah, but Tim, you know, there's this old joke you have, I don't know, how many flights in the air at any given time?
01:04:38.000Right, so the issue is, someone could share a video of Antifa and it'll play well with some people who are like, this is bad, but police brutality makes everyone, even conservatives, get angry.
01:04:47.000So if you look at like George Floyd, for instance, you know, you get people like Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity coming up and being like, we are upset by this.
01:04:56.000I don't have a problem with police brutality being a discussion because I think there are reforms to be had.
01:05:01.000What I'm saying is that the solution of it, I think a couple, six weeks ago there were a couple of police officers who beat up a child, a teenager or whatever in a retail store.
01:05:14.000I think two of the officers at a minimum were minority officers and the victim was also, it wasn't even a story.
01:05:22.000So that's the, What I'm trying to say is this.
01:05:50.000Sometimes crazies get hired into law enforcement.
01:05:53.000Complete clowns get hired and you don't have a good screening process and then the training sometimes is insane and then sometimes a lack of oversight.
01:06:02.000So if you don't address any of these core issues and you only focus, let's say, on race, then so many of these incidents will not get fixed.
01:06:11.000So going back to what I said a minute ago, and as you said it correctly, There isn't a shared suffering, a shared worry, and so people have extra time on their mind.
01:06:29.000And then you have social media and you see, you know, certain things play well, you want to get along on it.
01:06:34.000And you can make a lot of money spreading negative information.
01:06:37.000You get very famous very quickly on the internet because that stuff spreads like wildfire.
01:06:41.000Negative information or information that's very popular at the time.
01:06:45.000It's like if you notice in institutional media, you know, I have it sometimes in the private practice.
01:06:54.000When clients retain me and I need to work with them on media outreach, it's like If you want to pitch a story to a reporter, if no other journalist picked it up, that journalist is going to say, no, I don't know, why will I do it?
01:07:07.000And sometimes, if one person has it, everyone has it.
01:07:09.000So people like to jump on the narrative.
01:07:14.000It's an impossible problem to solve, you know, mentioning the negative news cycle and the money made, because, I mean, what are we doing?
01:07:21.000We're going on a show, we're saying, oh, look at what's happened here, and that's bad, and this is bad, and it's almost kind of...
01:07:29.000It's a recursive loop of us being like, people sharing negative information on the internet is bad.
01:07:34.000It's like literally doing that in the space of doing it.
01:07:38.000What would happen if we decided to stop talking about the things we thought were bad and we stopped talking about the news and these negative things?
01:07:45.000Then you would have more and more bad things happen because people wouldn't be paying attention and would be allowed to fester and grow.
01:07:51.000So I think if you go to any person, even a Black Lives Matter activist who's saying police brutality 24-7, Well, they're going to be like, I'm not doing anything wrong.
01:07:59.000I'm not doing this because I want to be rich.
01:08:00.000I'm doing it because police brutality is a problem.
01:08:02.000And then when you're like, yeah, but when you have a hundred thousand people posting police brutality over and over and over and kids don't see anything else, it's making them lose their minds.
01:08:10.000I don't know how you solve for that problem.
01:08:12.000People are allowed to be passionate and fight for what they believe in.
01:08:14.000I think there's a balance of, um, Too much talking about problems creates more problems.
01:08:19.000Not enough talking about problems creates more problems, because they're not being addressed.
01:08:22.000So you want to address them, and then solve them, and then not address them anymore.
01:08:28.000Unless there's still a problem, and the solution didn't work, and then you've got to readdress them, and address a new solution.
01:08:34.000But a problem without a solution is basically lighting yourself on fire.
01:08:37.000But the bigger problem is, again, let's talk about a problem, is that people sometimes don't want a solution outside of a set narrative.
01:08:45.000I think that's more destructive than people talking about problems.
01:08:48.000I love that then we can debate the solution as opposed to debating the problem.
01:08:51.000We know what the problem is a lot of times.
01:08:54.000But people don't want to debate the solution.
01:08:58.000I have a friend, a very very liberal friend, and I told him that police brutality has many factors not related Police brutality has many factors not related to racism.
01:09:21.000So I don't think the issue is, you know, we can talk about problems all day.
01:09:24.000China, Taiwan, inflation, the border, Afghanistan.
01:09:28.000But I think where people get stuck is having constructive conversations about solutions.
01:09:33.000It's also good to debate problems because sometimes you'll see a problem in a different way than someone else.
01:09:38.000I think a lot of time with Critical Race, especially that some like Robin DiAngelo, I'd like to have her on the show and talk to her because I think she sees the problem differently than I do.
01:09:45.000And if we can somehow redefine the problem so a place that we can both understand, then we can start redefining a solution that might.
01:09:53.000But like he said, some people don't want solutions.
01:10:44.000So during the Mediterranean migrant crisis, it was the migrant crisis because even the UN came out and said, actually, let me start over.
01:10:52.000So we had this crisis, I'm sure many of you are familiar with, where you had a lot of people from Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries fleeing through the Eastern Mediterranean from like Syria into, say, you know, into Europe and things like that.
01:11:10.000And that was the result of a lot of the conflict in the Middle East.
01:11:13.000But it quickly turned into a North African migrant crisis, where the UN said these people are economic migrants, not refugees.
01:11:22.000Now, I made that distinction when I reported on it.
01:11:25.000At the start of the refugee crisis, I'm like, refugees are fleeing from the East.
01:11:28.000Then later on, it was like the latest information says they're actually coming from North Africa and they're coming into Libya.
01:11:34.000And then they're trying to come into Europe.
01:11:35.000These are not refugees for the most part.
01:11:37.000They're economic migrants looking for work.
01:11:40.000I had a friend who was posting all this activist stuff, and I was talking to her, someone I've known for a really long time.
01:11:45.000And when I said, hey, here's the latest report from the UN, these, you know, clearly states these are economic migrants, so we can certainly try and defend their lives.
01:11:52.000We don't want them to drown or anything, but I think the distinction is important when we're trying to address what these people are looking for.
01:13:42.000Yeah, I think a lot about people, great people that are alive today that are receiving a lot of suffering or media negativity is like, dude, you're gonna be can retro baited in the future, man.
01:13:52.000Can we just think about what that means the right side of history?
01:14:07.000But the real meaning of, history will judge this way or that way, is that a lot of times things which seem to be popular and accepted at the time, turned out through the prism of history to be seen as crazy and insane and abusive.
01:14:20.000So if your political or policy position now is popular, it's 95% of media output, it's cool and hip, there's a big chance that history is going to look at it differently, which is why we need to wait for history.
01:14:35.000Although, as he said, the victor writes history.
01:14:38.000Yeah, I'll tell you what's funny is when you hear that during the civil rights era, What were proponents of segregation saying?
01:14:48.000They can exclude anybody you want from their private business.
01:14:51.000And we said, nah, you can't do that anymore, which I think is the right decision.
01:14:54.000Now you look at where we're at with big tech censorship of certain political opinions, and it's the establishment Democrat liberal type saying, but they're a private business.
01:15:03.000Just absolutely bending the knee to massive multinational corporations and literally being on the side of private businesses like Yeah, but I don't think the standard Democrat that favors censorship does so to bend the knee to a big corporation.
01:15:20.000They're doing it because, you know, list me five non-conservatives that have been suspended by Twitter.
01:15:28.000people except for the... There's actually a lot. No, the big guys, not the big names.
01:15:59.000There is not one conservative, not one person in the right side of parliament, not the right, conservative, the right-wing side, that can do anything that she has done and still be alive on Twitter.
01:17:29.000And they were not going to forgive Facebook for treating Trump as a client.
01:17:33.000Because they treat Ben Shapiro like a client.
01:17:34.000And they kept on pushing and pushing and pushing.
01:17:38.000Facebook kept on getting much more heat from Washington than Twitter.
01:17:42.000And I think it's just payback for how they were, and not only this, I think people think that Trump won.
01:17:48.000He had these narrow wins by utilizing Facebook as an instrument, and people don't want to forgive Facebook.
01:17:57.000It is a First Amendment issue, what we were talking about earlier, about defining the problems and agreeing on the problems, what they mean and what they are, and solutions, being able to talk and define those things.
01:18:06.000If we can't do that, on social media or in a public place, then our First Amendment is being violated and we're not going to be able to solve any of our problems.
01:18:29.000Why do we have this assumption that every person who you meet on the street is just Believes in standard, you know, core American values that I just listed.
01:18:37.000And maybe they have a different perspective on minimum wage, if it should be $10 or $15.
01:18:42.000No, you have a lot of people who subscribe to a fascist perspective or to a Stalinist perspective.
01:18:53.000And not because they're bad people, because they have generally a different worldview than you may have or I may have.
01:19:00.000So we have this assumption that everyone is out there just thinking and believing and wanting the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, gun rights and individualism, private properties, the freedom to send your child to school and to get an education and to work and we'll debate, you know, if we need to have a lockdown for a week or... No!
01:19:51.000But if you actually look at the data, it's like really bad.
01:19:55.000Yeah, but this, I think, this can be influenced by what you said is, you know, it's become a popular buzzword, the tribalism.
01:20:02.000What I'm saying, but they're adhering to the authority, the media.
01:20:05.000The media and the system and the political establishment say it's true, so it's true.
01:20:09.000The critical thinkers who are like, show me the evidence.
01:20:12.000This is, I think this is why you get the culture war break apart with left and right as it is.
01:20:17.000Establishment Democrat types will just say something today and then contradict themselves tomorrow.
01:20:22.000They'll scream and cry about a conservative doing something and then do it themselves because they don't care about principle, they care about following the authority.
01:21:54.000Well, I mean, a vaccine done right, yes, is a good thing.
01:21:58.000Do you think that people should have the choice to make medical decisions for themselves?
01:22:05.000Often, there are situations where emergencies may require that people submit to authority for the greater good, which is terrifying to say.
01:22:31.000But if you're under martial lockdown and cholera breaks out and you're able to vaccinate all the people, then you kind of got to do it without asking.
01:22:45.000Sometimes there's value to staging authority, yeah.
01:22:49.000Libertarians typically don't take authoritarian positions.
01:22:52.000What are you going to do if you have 7,000 people and they all have a vicious virus that's mutating and making them bleed from their eyes and you have the vaccine, but what are you going to go ask everyone for their permission?
01:24:05.000I mean, not generally, but I understand the value of authority from time to time.
01:24:09.000People who fall on the libertarian spectrum typically say things like, okay, so a libertarian approach to this would be like my opinion, and what I genuinely thought you'd have is vaccines are fantastic, amazing technology.
01:24:20.000In fact, I'm looking over the mRNA stuff.
01:24:22.000It sounds really, really fascinating and amazing, and I can't tell someone what they should do with their body because I believe that we have to respect the individual's right to choose.
01:24:31.000So what we can do is private businesses.
01:24:33.000If they say they want to mandate masks, I'm like, dude, I'm not gonna You know make an issue of a mom-and-pop shop saying you can't come in my store within reason because as we already mentioned with civil rights I think there are limits.
01:24:43.000So I certainly respect the power of authority in certain instances which is why I said typically when I say I'm left libertarian I'm not big on libertarian.
01:24:52.000I say I'm usually liberal because I actually think some things I agree with you in that sense.
01:24:57.000Yeah, but Tim, I think you're setting it up.
01:24:59.000It's like asking someone, is food a good thing or not?
01:25:06.000Oh, so you want people to die from hunger?
01:25:08.000I think so much of the discussion, again, I'm glad how you framed the question, because I think people need to think what they believe, whether it's Ian or your audience or myself and you.
01:25:18.000But a lot of times, the question, as I just said, it is, do you favor food or not?
01:25:32.000But then, therefore, because it's like, you know, do you believe in science or you don't believe in science?
01:25:36.000If you don't believe in science, why do you fly an airplane?
01:25:39.000Well, just because I believe in science doesn't mean every clown that puts together a couple of wires, I'm going to sit onto it and take off.
01:25:46.000Right, so in this particular instance, you know, I'm not saying in the greater of everything related to Ian's character, and the point I was trying to get to is when I mention civil rights, I say I think it's good that there were mandates and that there is respect for certain instances of authority.
01:26:01.000The issue is that You've got people who are looking at the media and saying, I want to see the information, I want to see the data, and make that choice for myself, and how that plays into the greater society and the decisions we make.
01:26:10.000And then you have people saying, shut up and do as you're told.
01:26:13.000Because as I said before, they are authoritarian, or they are Stalinist, they are fascist, they don't think or believe that people should have a certain level of liberty and choice.
01:26:30.000You know, a point that I try to make often is, you know, now that it's an emergency, we need to have lockdowns, this and that.
01:26:38.000What I try to argue is the authoritarian, the despot, do you think he goes out there and announces, hi everyone, I'm a despot, I want to take away your rights, stay home tonight.
01:26:48.000It's always packaged that it's an emergency or that it's for good of country.
01:26:54.000So, I'm not saying that someone who favors a lockdown due to coronavirus is the same as a murderous despot from 50 years ago.
01:27:02.000I'm saying that being in an emergency isn't the reason to suspend rides because we need the rides because it's an emergency.
01:27:10.000When it's an emergency, when you want to challenge it, that's exactly when we need it.
01:27:13.000I want to make sure I clarify the point I'm trying to make.
01:27:18.000There are people who have told me that I'm a fascist because I said, I think taxes are fine.
01:27:22.000You know, I've had libertarians be like, taxation is theft.
01:27:25.000And I'm like, I think not paying taxes is theft.
01:27:27.000Because from my perspective, you know, we enter into the society with 16 years of free life where you get roads, you get water, you get all of the regulations, you get police, fire department, EMS.
01:27:38.000And you pay no taxes because you're not working.
01:27:41.000And then when you get a job, they say, after your free 16 years, you can now start paying into the system.
01:27:46.000I'm being somewhat facetious and just making an argument, but people have said that's, you know, authoritarian or just like to force me to pay for you and all that stuff.
01:27:54.000And I'm like, then stop coming to my town and driving in my roads or wherever.
01:27:57.000The point I'm making is, It's less about the principles of being free and letting people do whatever they want, which libertarians certainly are.
01:28:04.000Like, big L libertarians are basically like, do your thing, leave me alone, I'll do my thing, I'll leave you alone.
01:28:09.000It's personal moral ethics, I suppose.
01:28:12.000When an individual says, I don't think she should be able to segregate on the basis of race, it's not so much about the principle of freedom, it's about...
01:28:19.000What weighs more in your mind morally?
01:28:22.000I think rejecting someone from a business who lives in the community and pays taxes is wrong if you're doing it for arbitrary reasons.
01:28:28.000Other people think I'm imposing authority over them.
01:28:32.000Real quick, the point I'm making is, Ian, if I say, do you believe this?
01:29:14.000But I mean, this is like military government.
01:29:16.000This is your parents going to a doctor and the doctor giving them advice.
01:29:20.000You're not going to make it seem like, you know, this is not.
01:29:23.000I think it's more about like the science, like the science.
01:29:25.000It's so vague, but like the reality you can't make if you're going to be a military commander and decide life and death for your troops and the enemy's troops, you need to know.
01:30:03.000One question based on two data points.
01:30:05.000According to Newsday, which is a Long Island newspaper, they asked the city and the city said in the first six and a half months of this year only 1.1% of coronavirus cases were reinfections.
01:30:20.000Again, Newsday reported it in the name of the New York City Health Department saying that only 1.1% reinfections in New York City 1.1% coronavirus cases in New York City the first six and a half months of year were reinfections, which would probably tell you that as of now, I don't know for how long, as of now, natural immunity from coronavirus is holding up quite high again.
01:30:45.000As of now, based on the numbers from New York City from reinfections.
01:30:49.000On the flip side, we see Israel, which vaccinated its population before most other countries, is already pushing a third shot.
01:30:59.000There they have Pfizer, already pushing a third shot for people 50 or above.
01:31:03.000That is because over time, the vaccine efficiency starts going down.
01:31:49.000Negative tests allow you entry as well.
01:31:52.000I think that's only in certain institutions, but I don't think, I'm not sure, but let's say in Israel where they have the vaccine passport, they do count if you were infected in the past and still have a certain level of antibodies.
01:32:10.000So that's, in other words, I'm more worked up by the fact that you have Mark Levin.
01:32:15.000He is the, I think, the chairman of the New York City Council Health Commission Committee in the City Council, and I know him personally.
01:32:23.000I'm more worked up about him not giving any legitimacy to people who have been affected While he's all in for the vaccine passport, even as we see that the efficiency starts falling over time.
01:33:05.000By the way, if you noticed before, I want to get to a point, another point.
01:33:08.000If you noticed before, when I said that natural immunity from coronavirus is holding up pretty high based on the Newsday story based from New York City data of the first six and a half months of the year, why am I saying it like in one sentence?
01:33:22.000It's because if I don't, whoa, Yossi's just making up stuff.
01:33:27.000People don't even want to have a conversation.
01:33:29.000They'll shut you down for misinformation even if I'm giving you data from the New York City Health Department as written by Newsday.
01:33:36.000When the Democrats say science, they're actually saying consensus.
01:33:41.000Yeah, because the scientists who oppose these ideas are getting banned and shut down.
01:33:46.000People like Dr. Brett Weinstein, for instance, who is an evolutionary biologist who certainly knows a bit about the area.
01:33:51.000I'm not gonna pretend like he's a virologist or anything.
01:33:53.000But they'll just say, he's wrong, shut him up.
01:34:15.000But I certainly don't think they want people to die.
01:34:17.000Like, look, there's probably evil people somewhere and sometimes and they do bad things.
01:34:22.000But I think for the most part, we'll wrap this up and go to Super Chats.
01:34:27.000I really do think if you find a good doctor, someone who pays attention to the news and is well-read in their field, they're going to give you great advice.
01:34:37.000But Tim, I don't think the baseline is if people want you to die or not.
01:34:42.000I have a problem, again, not as a problem, but I'm perplexed why someone who is a normal person, a normal person would probably have a cell number.
01:34:52.000Why would he dismiss the fact that the efficiency of the vaccine is dropping over time as you see a third shot is being pushed?
01:35:05.000Why are you dismissing... Well, hold on.
01:35:06.000Why are you dismissing the... There was one study, I think, came out, we had on tempcast.com, showing that AstraZeneca and Pfizer, I think it was Pfizer, have actually maintained their efficiency according to a study on people in the U.S.
01:35:18.000So the issue is you'll read some stories and then you'll say how come they're dismissing this and then I'll read a story But I have an answer but I have an answer because because Pfizer was pushed in Israel Earlier than probably any other country or one of the first few so Israel is seeing the outcome of Pfizer Ahead of other countries, which is Pfizer works, the vaccine, the double shots work, and therefore the numbers came down.
01:35:43.000And even Florida, everyone was busy the last few weeks.
01:35:45.000Florida's death rate this year, in the summer, death numbers from coronavirus were much lower than at the same time last year.
01:35:55.000The question is for how long it works and how effective it is.
01:35:58.000And why are you dismissing people who for now, again it may change, and I think it will be worrisome if it becomes more widespread, that as of now, based on New York City data, only 1.1% cases the first half of the year, a little bit more than that, were reinfections.
01:36:28.000If someone had coronavirus 90 days or more before the current infection, that would be counted as a reinfection.
01:36:37.000And for six and a half months in New York City, it's not a small place, six and a half months, city data as reported by Newsday less than two weeks ago, only 1.1% were reinfections, which is an amazing number.
01:36:47.000So if the CDC says that people with the vaccine can have coronavirus and can carry it, so how does the pass help you?
01:38:25.000It said here, uh, you were saying something, uh, like about him being arrogant.
01:38:29.000In the early days of YouTube, I would make internet videos and we would go on stickum.com and talk and Phil would come into my chat rooms and we'd hang out.
01:38:36.000And then I met him at a, 77 up that YouTube live up in San Francisco.
01:38:40.000I always really liked him like I still like he's really smart really fearless But I don't know about his politics.
01:38:47.000I haven't talked to him like a decade Yeah, I've met him a couple times, and the thing we did talking about Philip DeFranco is that all of a sudden now he's posting with this really mean, like, it's just, I don't know if the right word is for it, it's like, hate-filled.
01:39:01.000Like, just not solution-oriented, not calm, not rational, just telling people, F you, and he's been on the wrong side of a decent amount of news stories, like Covington Kids is a really good example, and I'm just like, what happened to us, you know?
01:39:13.000Like, how we've become this, like, Maybe I shouldn't say us.
01:39:17.000Maybe I should say what happened to him.
01:39:34.000So you're not just going to be inundated with all this negativity all the time.
01:39:37.000Sometimes you're gonna see us, you know, playing with chickens and we had baby chicks hatch and we're gonna be filming that stuff and playing D&D.
01:39:42.000We're doing a Tales of Intrigue like paranormal mystery show.
01:39:46.000We're trying to create a balance of the information people get so they're not inundated by this.
01:39:50.000But so many people have just become vile, nasty people.
01:39:54.000I think people are vile and nasty by nature.
01:39:57.000It's just we see it more because information travels quicker these days.
01:40:03.000And infamy is a little bit popular on social media, you know, going crazy and dropping a bomb, so to speak.
01:40:09.000Figuratively speaking, I think people like it.
01:40:10.000Make equal amounts of money being infamous or being famous these days, it seems like.
01:40:14.000Kyle Miller says, when I said that Kabul is going to be the Saigon of our generation on Friday, I did not expect it to happen over the weekend.
01:40:48.000David Aloa says, why would you ever conclude DJT would bomb when Trump has never wanted to sacrifice lives?
01:40:55.000If it was an accidental casualty, it was an accidental casualty when he took out Soleimani.
01:41:02.000With Trump, I'm not, yes, he called off that airstrike on Iraq, said he didn't want, the amount of lives that would be lost would be bad.
01:41:10.000When the Taliban is overrunning towns and there's active combat, do you think that Trump wouldn't be like, we need an airstrike on enemy combatants storming the city and threatening to kill?
01:41:30.000Trump, one of the first things he did as president was he ordered a commando raid in Yemen, which resulted in the death of an eight-year-old American girl.
01:41:36.000We can pretend like, you know, Trump was the hero who was going to save all these lives, but he did a lot of things that many other presidents did.
01:41:44.000I just preferred the fact that he was like, I'm getting out of Afghanistan and then started working on ending, you know, ending this stuff, getting our troops out of Syria.
01:41:50.000I don't think any of them are perfect.
01:41:53.000And I think the problem with Trump and with even some of Obama's early orders is that they've got this permanent government, people who are appointed to bureaucratic positions.
01:42:01.000And then you get a president who sits down and says, now I want to do X. And they go, read this.
01:42:06.000Then the president reads it and says, what should we do?
01:42:08.000And they say, trust me, we'll do this.
01:42:10.000And the president says, you got it and signs off on it.
01:43:59.000And there was a statement from Mike Pompeo where he said that, uh, I think, I think it was Trump or I can't remember who, someone said to the Taliban that the full force of America will rain down on them if they violate the deal or, or, you know, or things like that.
01:44:12.000And I think with Trump in office, the Taliban were like, all right, all right, we're going to get something out of this.
01:44:53.000When COVID restrictions were being lifted in Texas and Florida, Biden came out and said, we might have to have more lockdowns and things like that, as if Texas and Florida did not exist at all.
01:45:29.000Sorta, can't read your last name, says, Why wouldn't Islamic people, who have been taught their entire lives that Westerners are bad according to the Quran, embrace Western democracy?
01:45:39.000American politicians, media, and military officers have no respect or insight into other cultures.
01:45:46.000I think that one of the tenets of Islam is if you're backed into a corner, fight with everything you have, and they feel like they've been pushed into a corner economically as the military-industrial complex is spread throughout the region.
01:46:01.000I think it's possible that the religious perspective plays a role to some people, to some actors, but I think we can't dismiss the human flow of things.
01:46:12.000As the example that I gave earlier about Canada.
01:46:16.000Imagine growing up 20 years having Canadian troops making checkpoints at every corner and one day they play ball with you and the next day they arrest your uncle because he's supposedly a bad guy.
01:46:25.000Your uncle was in prison for two years.
01:47:23.000I mean, you'd spend so much money, bankrupt yourself like seven times.
01:47:27.000So I see how it's just an impossible win, using the civilization metaphor.
01:47:31.000Well, like the new Civ, you go to an area that's like a desert region, there's no resources, you just... Just raise it to the ground and leave.
01:47:40.000It's where, it's basically in the game, you export your culture, your movies, your music, and then other countries start adopting your behaviors, and then your borders expand and press on theirs, and then people are like, that's way cooler than this, and then they rebel or abandon.
01:47:57.000We got an actual important super chat here.
01:48:00.000No offense, Jason, I just mean it was a funny hokey one, but this one is like actually interesting.
01:48:04.000John Hutto says the 200k number for Taliban fighters comes from a January 2021 West Point Counter-Terror Center Volume 14 Issue 1 report, quoting a BBC report in 2018 from Dr. Dawood Azami and a tweet I tagged LidsOn.
01:48:20.000Very interesting that the initial source goes back to 2018, which would suggest that much of this growth happened under Obama and Biden.
01:48:27.000And by changing the source, it now makes it appear as though the latest development happened under Donald Trump.
01:48:44.000But I think there's a rhetorical victory in the president coming out and repeating the words of what many anti-war activists have said for a long time about the wasted time and energy and money in Afghanistan.
01:50:46.000I certainly, I certainly think so as well.
01:50:48.000I think with Korea, it was the, it's, you know, massive force of communism taking over all these countries, and we said, hey, don't take over these countries, and then we get involved in these conflicts.
01:50:56.000Though I'm not a fan of what happened with a lot of, I gotta say, I gotta be honest.
01:51:30.000No, I think it was... The Chinese and the Americans using their weapons.
01:51:33.000Communists were spreading across the Asian continent, and the U.S.
01:51:36.000was like, We can ignore this because they're not our countries, but then what happens in 30 years when the communists control all of Asia, Europe, and North Africa, and then they're impossible to stop, and then they start cutting off our supplies, and then the U.S.
01:51:52.000It's possible, and probably even likely, I would say, that it was more than one reason, or more than one, like, positive outcome that could come out of it.
01:51:59.000You get to test your weapons, and you get to stop communism.
01:52:51.000Tovid Benson says, How can you expect the U.S.
01:52:54.000to teach community identity and create cultural cohesion to a foreign entity if we are abolishing those same values and cohesion in the U.S.?
01:53:01.000did not make an effort to understand the local tribal cultures to find what would create cohesion.
01:54:41.000So you don't want to get too far ahead of everybody else.
01:54:46.000Justin Middleton says, Tim, big fan, but I don't understand this.
01:54:48.000You often quote Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
01:54:53.000Why doesn't this apply globally, considering your stance on foreign intervention?
01:54:57.000I don't think the Taliban are going to be an international cabal that, you know, take over the world, but that's why I was saying about the Soviet Union, I understand why the US was doing what it did, and I'm certainly happy that South Korea exists and was defended, although the US wasn't able to Defend all of Korea.
01:55:17.000Vietnam was a major failure and we lost there, but ultimately the Soviet Union fell.
01:55:24.000I look at Afghanistan and I'm like, what are we worried about with Taliban?
01:55:27.000Like I understand 9-11 and all that stuff for sure, but that was specifically targeting a group of people But that's a line the president said today.
01:55:35.000Like, technically we could have left Afghanistan 10-15 years ago, and if we can't leave today, we can't leave in 15-20 years from now either.
01:55:41.000It's like, what are we trying to accomplish at this point?
01:55:44.000Yeah, he said, we went after Osama bin Laden, we got him.
01:56:26.000were to leave Afghanistan in some sort of a more orderly fashion, you know, using the last few months to do it and not having these images the last 72 hours, I don't think it would undermine the U.S., the role of the U.S.
01:56:42.000So I don't think leaving in itself is going to be a problem.
01:56:45.000I think how it's done and You know, not being able to keep a government going, spending so much money in the military and turning your back on people who help you.
01:56:56.000I think those things will be a disaster.
01:56:59.000All right, BlackRockBeacon says, Yeah, I don't know.
01:58:06.000I don't know, but I appreciate all the superchats of people constantly bringing him up, because he was warning us, and when people bring it up and we get to say it, more people will learn about it.
01:58:12.000Yeah, he told us about how the long game, basically, the communist long game of, like, they get into your culture, and then they start ceding dissent for 20 years, and then they... so we're kind of... he was telling us about this in the 90s, and saying, it's happening right now.
01:59:15.000Our mission is to fight bigotry against the Orthodox Jewish community and to advocate for civil rights, civil liberties that affect our community.
01:59:21.000For example, last year we pushed a lot of data and advocacy in terms of restoring patient rights in hospitals.
01:59:29.000I think, not I think, until today most hospitals do not have regular visitation restored due to coronavirus and I think it's important for people who believe in family values to have the ability to visit family members.
01:59:43.000It's very important for their recovery so we advocate it on that front.
01:59:47.000We also pushed a lot of advocacy to open schools last year in New York because, again, unlike most of the U.S., I think like only 21% of the U.S.
02:00:23.000And also we were, one of the lawsuits that were brought against Como to permit people to go to synagogues, to congregations.
02:00:32.000was something that we helped coordinate.
02:00:35.000You know, that lawsuit ultimately was sidelined because two other lawsuits from, I think, the Catholics in Brooklyn and also from other major Orthodox organizations advanced to the Supreme Court.
02:00:46.000So this lawsuit didn't take off, but we were busy, you know, on the front.
02:00:50.000So that's where we would, you know, advocate a lot.
02:00:53.000On these issues and then on the defensive front, I think Como for a while last fall and also Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, they had a disproportionate focus on Orthodox Jews as a community by skewing coronavirus data points and we pushed back with press releases, articles, TV appearances.
02:01:14.000Studies and numbers, you know, to keep the conversation going.
02:01:16.000I think any grown community, especially community that stands out.
02:01:21.000I mean, you walk in the street, somebody's Orthodox Jewish, you can see it.
02:01:25.000I think it's important to get information out there, either in a proactive or a reactive fashion, and we try doing that.
02:03:58.000We'll just grab one more, very important.
02:04:01.000Garhent says, Ian is to the left of Stalin.
02:04:04.000Someone have Ian do the political compass online.
02:04:06.000It'll be funny to see the look on his face when he realizes he's a commie.
02:04:09.000Controlled opposition, we can do this.
02:04:11.000All right, everybody, if you haven't already, give a tap to that little like button, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends if you really like it, leave us a good review, leave some comments, and go to TimCast.com, become a member, because there will be a members-only segment coming up It usually goes live around 11 or so p.m. So you'll
02:04:29.000definitely want to check that one out. They're always more fun
02:04:30.000We've had a lot of people say can we make the members only show the main show and I'm like I guess the problem is
02:04:35.000We get banned. Yeah immediately. I don't I don't think we say anything that crazy
02:04:39.000But we're allowed to actually say like here's what YouTube would ban us for if we were gonna have this conversation
02:04:44.000So we try to have them there. I Guess it kind of sucks in a lot of ways
02:04:47.000But we're growing the business and we've got a lot of stuff on the way
02:04:51.000Someone super chatted that I said Tales of Intrigue, that is not the name of the show.
02:04:55.000That's generally it, because Shane, who's writing all this stuff, he wrote like a Mafia murder mystery cold case, which is really awesome.
02:05:02.000And so we're turning, you know, his articles into a show, and then we're going to have his story, and then followed by someone from the house, like, hanging out and talking about the stuff.
02:05:11.000So it'll be really cool, like, when he talks about some—when he writes up, like, DMT or whatever, Ian will be, you know, have a conversation with him, and that'll be a members-only podcast.
02:05:18.000So definitely become a member at timcast.com.
02:05:21.000Is there anything you want to shout out, Yossi, before we go?
02:05:23.000I just want to give you a thanks for giving me the opportunity to appear on your show and I want to give a shout out to you.
02:06:04.000So I think to run a business and to start a business, especially in the commentary world, I think it takes a lot of guts.
02:06:11.000Especially that you never know when haters will try to pile on and then try to pile on in a destructive way and try to de-platform and destroy you.
02:06:23.000I think this, you know, having the opportunity to speak to your audience is what made me take this drive of more than four hours.
02:06:45.000I think we spoke of the show, a lot of times people like to say, you know, cancel culture, you know, is bad.
02:06:52.000Okay, so if cancel culture is bad, you should be out there and conversing with people who are not part of the machine.
02:07:00.000People who are out there who may, who others may try to cancel.
02:07:03.000I'm not saying he's a pariah, but I'm just trying to get a point across that From a business perspective and from a policy perspective and from an accomplishment perspective, what Tim is doing is amazing.
02:07:17.000It's a benefit for me of being able to be here and I wanted to join your show no matter the time that it takes because I think you're doing amazing work.