← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Political Corruption and Media Manipulation in America | Dave Smith - PT 1
01:12:05
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- [00:01]
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- [01:01]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Few topics ignite as much debate and emotion as the Israel Palestine conflict. It is a subject loaded with historical complexities and moral questions that have consumed the world's attention. As somebody who believes it is important to face directly the biggest issues that we face as a society, I want to bring on more people to talk about this topic. And today we're taking a hard look at this one with somebody that has made a name for themselves really diving into the complexities of the issue. From the Palestinian side, join me in welcoming a commentator known for his clear eyed analysis and thought provoking insights, none other than Dave Smith. Dave Smith, welcome to the show.
- [01:45]
Dave Smith
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:47]
Tom Bilyeu
It is a pleasure. As I was saying, you become a part of my sense making apparatus. And so getting a chance to sit down with people that have helped me think through some tough issues is always a lot of fun. So thanks for taking the time.
- [02:00]
Dave Smith
Well, thank you. I appreciate it. And like I told you before, it's a, it's a bad comment on the state of affairs when I'm the one making sense. But I do appreciate that that's hilarious.
- [02:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Let me ask, when you were talking to Tucker Carlson, you said that you were terrified for the future of our nation. What exactly are you worried about?
- [02:21]
Dave Smith
Well, I mean, what, you know, I got two little kids, so that's what really makes me scared. If, if I was still like single and childless, I think I'd be much more just like, oh, this is a fun ride, let's see where this ends. But I, I don't feel that way. The now that I'm just an old nervous dad. I mean, there's a mix of a lot of things, I guess, that, that all seem to be kind of happening at once. So you have. First off, the, the financial cliff that we're rapidly driving off is, is pretty terrifying there. You know, it's not just the $35 trillion in debt or the fact that that interest on the debt is now overtaking the budget, but when you really start to get into like the derivatives and how much actual debt there is, how the dollar being the world reserve currency, has kind of been propping up this whole thing and that if those, you know, if forget even those dollars being returned, but if we can't just continue to export pieces of paper, how much, you know, our whole economic system is built off of, that is scary. But then at the same time, you also have this kind of like really intense cultural divide. I think that cultural and race and sex relations and things like this are just simply much worse in this country than they have been in my life. And, you know, I'm 40 in my life. I think they're. They're certainly at their worst. And then on top of that, as if all of that wasn't enough, you have these constant, this kind of open flirtation by the ruling class with some type of like real creepy technological neo fascism. I mean, the, the stuff about like a central bank digital curr and you know, all of this kind of like you will own nothing and be happy. And you know that like the, the worst of the clips that come out of like WF forums, which I understand aren't exactly, you know, guaranteed to be the law of the land anytime soon, but it's still enough to be kind of creeped out by that. All of this happening with the rise of AI and how advanced the kind of the spying apparatus of the federal government has become. You know, with all of that, I think there's more than little bit to be concerned about. Oh, and I didn't mention World War iii.
- [04:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that one. How, how real do you think that is? Like, is that. Are we actually flirting with World War II or is that just the sort of skull and bones that we're meant to avoid?
- [05:11]
Dave Smith
Well, there's a. Was Jason Stapleton was a very bright guy. He once said, and I really liked that he said, never, never bet all your chips on the end of the world because you're only going to be right once, and when you are, it won't matter. So I'm not saying, you know, that this is. That we're going to be in a world war, hopefully. We're not. I do. I am. And I'm somebody who kind of focuses on the corruption of the ruling class for, you know, a lot more of my life than the average person does. But I have been absolutely stunned by the recklessness of the. The policy of the Biden administration since the war in. In Ukraine broke out. Like there is. There seems to be no considering of the possibility that, like, we are risking so much for such an unspecified goal, you know, victory, whatever that means exactly, for Ukraine. And the fact that even over the last couple months now, I mean, there's been more and more signals, I guess, for more than just a couple months, these signals that the regime in D.C. will support Ukraine striking inside of Russia and then even supporting as the war moves inside of Russia's borders. And this is simply unlike anything even in the Cold War. And if you know your Cold War history, like, we actually came pretty close to nuclear war on a couple of occasions, and it was only through communications at the highest levels that we were able to avoid that. And these days, they openly brag that they're not communicating at all. And so I just. I think it's so crazy to be involved in a proxy war on Russia's border. And now I'm not saying it's. We're going to all die in a nuclear war, but the fact that we would even tolerate upping the. The risk of that for no strategic advantage whatsoever is been pretty wild to say.
- [07:14]
Tom Bilyeu
So what's your thesis on that? So I tend to assume that while I may have wildly divergent values from the people in power, I don't think them stupid. So is it that they're dumb, or is there an agenda that we are unaware of that makes them say, hey, don't worry, we're not going to move Naito an inch East Ops. We just keep marching east, like nine minutes after making that statement.
- [07:43]
Dave Smith
I mean, I, you know, I guess it'd be comforting to kind of believe that no, there is some real wisdom there and they actually have a plan and know better. I got to say, I think that at least amongst the political class, this is more or less how I see it, right? So amongst the political class, I think what you have, for the most part, as you may have noticed, is like the same generation of politicians as when I was a kid. For the most part. I mean, I know they just had to swap Biden out. They had to swap Biden out for Kamala Harris, but, you know, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, who's the President of the United States, presumably they are all kind of came up during the unipolar moment. Maybe, maybe they came up a little before that, but then they were really all in power in that moment. And I'm referring to was what Charles Krattenhammer called the unipolar moment after the Soviet Union collapsed. And I think that being in this moment was unlike anything else in human history, truly like one dominant global empire with a, you know, military and technological capabilities unlike anything that any country had ever had. And there was essentially no. There was no counter force. And so they were kind of allowed to do whatever they wanted to, or they were able to do whatever they wanted to. And I do think that this bred a very unimpressive group of political leaders. It's breathtaking. If you go back and listen to political speeches that were given by Eisenhower or Jack Kennedy and just think about how much. Not only how much smarter those guys were, but how much smarter they presumed their audience, the American people, were, and listen to, you know, political speeches from today, it's like. I mean, just watching the Democratic National Convention over the last few days, it's unbelievable how dumb the whole thing is. I forget whether you lean left or right, and this is true for the Republicans, too. Whether you lean left or right, everything has gotten so freaking dumb. And the more I look at this, I'm like, no, I don't think these politicians have some master plan. I don't think that behind the scenes, Kamala Harris is like, a genius or Joe Biden is a genius and they have some plan. I think they are really unimpressive. They're. They're essentially the. The old saying of born on third base and felt like you hit a triple. Like, they feel like they built this, the greatest power in the history of the world. When they didn't, they just inherited it. And then who. Who you have. Who's really pulling the strings are essentially big business interests. And they are very smart, but they're very smart and motivated at making money. And so, like, you know, if you're like all that talk about NATO expansion, I mean, that was a. If you were just somebody in a weapons company who's trying to figure out how to make more profits. And you're like, listen, we're going to fund these think tanks that advocate for NATO expansion, and then we're going to lobby these politicians to get this NATO expansion. Well, it was a great deal for you. You got to sell weapons to, like, a much, much bigger market. Than you would have before. So I think there is, like, an intelligent plan going on, but it's not, you know, not one that's like, on behalf of the American people.
- [11:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you think that this is all ultimately just a question of money?
- [11:27]
Dave Smith
No, not entirely. No one thing is ever completely the answer. So, I mean, I think money, I think business explains a lot, Explains a lot of it. No, but there is. There is ideology at work also. And certainly I think that, like, the, the neoconservatives, I think, certainly had an ideology about what. What should be done in the. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and how we should have, as they called it, a project for a new American century. I. I think there. There were. There are true believers in that group. And I'm, you know, I don't know exactly with some of the other stuff, you know, like my, My gut, not that I know this for sure, I can't read people's minds, but my gut is that a lot of the progressive Democrats, the Democratic elite type, don't really believe in a lot of the ideology that they espouse. I mean, I don't believe that Joe Biden is really concerned about trans issues or something like that. I just, I don't buy that. I don't think anybody who's 80 is really, like. I just, I don't buy that they're really concerned about trans issues. But I do think that there are, like, neoconservatives who really believe in their hawkish foreign policy view. And I do think that there are. There are people in D.C. you know, like, human beings are a weird species. It's it. If all of your scent incentives dictate that you believe something, most of the times human beings aren't just going, I'll be evil and act out my incentives, even though I know they're wrong. We have a tremendous capacity to, like, convince ourselves that the thing that's good for us is actually the correct move. So I'm sure there are some people in D.C. who really believe in, like, you know, some peace through strength or we got to go, you know, confront Iran or something like that. I, you know, I'm sure there were people who really believed that if. If we toppled Saddam Hussein, democracy would sweep the region. People can convince themselves of all types of nonsense.
- [13:29]
Tom Bilyeu
I have a theory that is. It'll be interesting to hear what you think. So I think that when you view this all through the lens of power, like the will to power, like Nietzsche's will to power, it all starts making sense when you look at it through the lens of money, it actually makes less sense. There's clearly money involved, but I think money through the lens of, again, the will to power, that somebody can use that money to be in control. That makes sense. So what it looks like to me, even when I look at Russia is having. I'm old enough to remember the height of the Cold War. I remember one of my neighbors asking me if I thought we were all going to die from a nuclear blast. I was a kid. Perfectly timed for the movie Red dawn, where it isn't specifically Russia, but that's obviously what it's meant to be. They just paratrooper in take over a town. I used to have a recurring nightmare about Red dawn actually happening. And so I think when I play out the following scenario, a lot of things make sense. You have the old guard still in. In control. They lived through all of that. They knew what that was. It felt like an unbelievably jubilant moment when we tore down the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union collapses. It just felt like, man, this is America. Really. The ideal of freedom and capitalism has won over communism and tyranny. This is a fantastic moment, unipolar. Let's make the most of being the only power and we are the good guys, and so let's go do what good guys do and, and bring democracy to the rest of the world. Now where that starts to read is like, okay, this is really just the. The COVID story for my will to power that gets cloudy. Like you said, some people probably convince themselves of it. Other people may be purely cynical. It almost doesn't matter. It's okay, we won. We are now going to use our influence. We clearly will pitch it as benevolent. And then it becomes a question of, okay, if. If that's what we're doing, and this is the old war, and now we're pushing NATO up closer to Russ. We're having PTSD essentially of when there really was parity between us and Russia economically. I get why they want to keep Russia weak. Somehow, some way, they don't realize that when you topple a regime, it seems almost universally that something worse comes into power. But when I run that thought experiment, everything I see clicks into place. Do you think there's anything missing in that assessment?
- [16:15]
Dave Smith
Well, I, you know, I, again, I don't think it's necessarily one or the other. I mean, I think the will to power is certainly a major factor, and, and human psychology, of course, is a. Is a factor with all people and, and powerful people don't escape that and there have been like some studies on this done and stuff of like the drug that is power and human beings are, you know, genetically hardwired to desire power and status and all of these things. And, and I've even seen it, like just in my little bit of experience in like the corporate media. It's, it's amazing how much these people are driven by the fact that, you know, they, they got a phone call from a senator and they're going to be at a cocktail party with the Fed chairman. And like, there's little like, status things like that mean a lot to people. And I'm sure everybody listening could think of examples of that just with regular people they know, you know, like within their little company or where, whatever. I, I would say though, that I think along with. So I don't disagree with anything you said, but I think along with that there was, you know, so if you, if you go back and read Bill Buckley from like in, in the 50s there, even back then he was writing and like in right after World War II about how, look, we essentially. The conservative movement, it probably wasn't called that yet, but essentially the conservative movement, look, we believe in limited government and, you know, the constitution and being a normal country. The problem is we have the Soviet Union, and because we have the Soviet Union, we have to all be cold warriors right now. He actually said we have to embrace a totalitarian dictatorship in our own shores in order to fight off. You can go look this up. In order to fight off the totalitarian dictatorship abroad, we have to create our own military industrial complex, is essentially his argument. And this was the entire justification for this gigantic honeypot. I mean, not just NATO, but like the entire military industrial complex budget. The justification was NATO. And as soon, I'm sorry, the justification was the Soviet Union. And as soon as the Soviet Union collapses, I think there is this collective freak out from a whole bunch of people who now have to justify their job. I mean, like what, you know, like even just the existence of NATO didn't make sense anymore once the Soviet Union collapsed. They were an organization to defend against Soviet aggression. Well, there's no more Soviet Union. And for the, you know, there were lots of people, some liberals and some conservatives and some like even in positions of power or influence who were like, oh, okay, great, the Soviet Union fell, so now we can have a big cut in defense spending. I mean, this was the justification for how high it was and now we can return to being a normal country. There was a lot of talk of a peace dividend and you can read this in the. The neoconservative writing in the 90s where they were all, like, very concerned about this. That they're like, oh, man. Like, even up to, like, 96, when Bob Dole was running, and they're all. They're all kind of writing like, oh, man. Like, there's this. There's such an appetite in America to worry about our own issues, like, whatever. We don't have to worry about running the whole world now. We can, like, kind of focus on issues that we have here at home. And when there is that type of environment, I do think it makes you find a lot of people going, oh, well, look, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Okay, this is a huge thing. We have to go. Because if that's a huge thing, then all of a sudden your existence is justified again. And so I. I just do think there is also, like, a. A money element to it, however that plays out psychologically, that it's like, oh, there's. You know, there is a thing where you see this all over the place. I mean, if there's. If. If there's a whole, like, movement to, let's say, or different organizations to combat racism, well, what do you do when America becomes a much less racist country than it used to be? Do you go, all right, boys, time to close up shop. We're all done here. Or do you just turn up the hysteria and go, well, we found five more incidences of racism, even though they all turn out to be hoaxes or exaggerated or something like that. And so I think that's kind of what happened with the military industrial complex with NATO with all of this. It's like their reason for existing disappeared. And then they were like, well, we gotta replace that with something else. And much like with the racism stuff, the less of it that there organically is, the more you have to embellish and the crazier you have to become because you have to. You know, it's like, oh, so this NASCAR guy got a noose hung in his driveway. Wait, that doesn't seem plausible. It's like, well, I don't know. We gotta find something, because no one's really fighting about this stuff. And so I think a lot of that is what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union.
- [21:22]
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- [21:53]
Tom Bilyeu
that's, that's very interesting. A lot of confluence. I want to go back to what you were saying about Bill Buckley. There's something interesting there. The impulse to rule the world is something that I find. I find myself constantly wanting to push back on people who I think trust themselves too much. What do you make of the impulse? That, and I, I, I never know what name to give this. The elites, the anointed class, whatever. We need a, a better name for the sort of psychological organizing principle that they all fall under, but it's the sense of the nanny state. There are some people that are smart. This is what I think is their operating system. There are some people that are smart. There are some people that are dumb. We are the smart people. We have to protect the dumb people. There's certainly an amount of arrogance there. It isn't just we want to help, it's we're superior. And I don't want to have to deal with your dumb idea. So, shh, little boy, be quiet and just do as you're told. But what do you make of the fact that these incredibly intelligent people can say we need a dictatorship on our own shores?
- [23:03]
Dave Smith
Well, it was to, to be clear, not a dictatorship, but he said a totalitarian bureaucracy was, was his term, so, but so much better. I mean, honestly, you know, with, with Bill Buckley. I mean, the guy did work for the CIA and then supposedly left and then came out and said this stuff. So I'm like, I'm certainly open to the possibility that that was just a CIA operation to, like, keep the whole thing going in terms of broad, like, to your broader question. Yeah, I mean, I think this is kind of why the Lord of the Rings was such a. You know, a brilliant example of this is that it's like, it's even for people who really want to destroy the ring of power, it's tough once you get a hold of it. And once you get a hold of it, I mean, come on, like, I mean, if you could remake the world in your image, wouldn't your image be better than, you know, than anyone else's? And it's very easy to rationalize that away and to go, well, if I don't do this, someone else is going to do it, and they'll do it much worse. I mean, I, I hear that rationalization constant when defending the American empire that it's like, well, I mean, hey, if we didn't do it, China would do it. So therefore whatever we're, it's better, it's got to be better with us than with them. And you know, it's very easy to, to feel that way. And it's very rare. This is why George Washington is like, you know, revered because it's very rare when there are people who even. And Washington had a lot of flaws, but he could have been a king and he chose not to be. And that in itself is so rare that people are like, whoa, that's incredible. The idea that someone would have turned down power that they could have had. And perhaps it's true that almost any country in the position that the United States of America was in the 90s would have probably done the same thing. That if you had this opportunity to rule the world, who's really going to turn that down? Or at least it would be the rarest of, of men who would turn that down because they were like, no, listen, this isn't, it's not the right thing to do and it's not in our long term interest. So yeah, I think, I think the, the desire to rule the world is something that's existed for a long time and there's, there's no question. I mean look, you don't really even have to read between the lines too much to look just you know, listen to anything in the G7 summits or the WEF or something like that. It's like, yeah, they're all talking about ruling the world. I mean they're all, they're talking about what, what temperature it should be outside in a hundred years and how they're going to legislate what the, what the temperature can be in the year, you know, whatever the year 100 years from now or whatever. And so it's, it's pretty, I mean they're talking about global regulations. I mean what is this rules for the entire world to follow? It's clearly they're animating, you know, like the animating characteristic. There is a desire for global domination.
- [26:07]
Tom Bilyeu
And why is it a bad idea if they really have the right answers? Why is one global government a bad idea?
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Dave Smith
Well, number one, because they don't have the right answers. And look, I mean even if you, even if they did, I mean if you were to set up a one world government, well, all it takes is one government going bad now and the entire world is ruined. You know, and so this is the, the, the like decentralization of Power and liberty go hand in hand. And you, you really never have one without the other. And the idea that even if you were to put the most perfect angels in tar in in charge of the world, it's like the old Lord Atkin, you know, concept that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so the idea that any group of men are capable of ruling the world and not being corrupted is at best highly unlikely, at worst completely impossible. And in the event that they are corrupted, if you have one world government, then you're in the, you're in the nightmare scenario, which is that everybody lives under a totalitarian regime.
- [27:24]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so during the Cold War, when we actually had two opposing forces, it did not feel safe. In fact, I would say it certainly for Americans it has felt way safer in a unipolar moment. But I've heard you say that unipolarity is the problem. Is that only true because there are so many people that are not Americans, or is the unipolar moment actually bad for Americans ourselves?
- [27:53]
Dave Smith
Well, I think it's very, I mean, it's very bad for the American people, broadly speaking. It's probably been very good for Washington D.C. and for, you know, giant corporations who are connected to Washington D.C. and, and I think there is some truth to the fact that there, it, there was a danger, the danger of nuclear war was higher in the Cold War than immediately after the Soviet Union fell. I think now because of these awful policies and backing Ukraine, we've, we've brought that risk back. So that's not good. The, the thing is that, that what the unipolar moment allowed was for America to go on a type of global adventurism that they would not have been able to get away with beforehand. There's a reason why we didn't do anything like the terror wars before the Soviet Union collapsed was a counterweight to us. There was a counterbalance to some degree. And so what you see after the Soviet Union collapses is like this tremendous expansion in American warfare in American spending and debt and money printing and all of this stuff. And I think that that has been very bad for the nation. It's been very bad for the people in general. And so that's, that's what I meant by saying that the unipolar moment was kind of a disaster for the American people. That doesn't mean that the Cold War is good. There were terrible things that happened during the Cold War. But you know, if you just look at, say like in a 20 year period, roughly speaking, a little more than 20 years. The fact that America's fought a war in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, in Somalia, in Yemen and in Niger and Pakistan with the drone bomb campaigns, I mean, there simply just wasn't any, there wasn't anything quite like that during the Cold War. Even with Vietnam and the war in Korea and stuff like that. It wasn't like just war, war, war, war, war, war, war. In a 20 year period with this many people dying and this much money wasted in this much of a region of the world totally destabilized. And I don't think you would have that in a non unipolar world. So that I think has been the real disaster of all of this.
- [30:19]
Tom Bilyeu
And how do you see us getting out of the unipolar moment? Obviously for us there, there would be a potential economic defeat that goes hand in hand with that. So if it's bad for us, but the solution is potentially worse than the disease, what do we do about that?
- [30:39]
Dave Smith
Well, I mean, we're, the way we actually are getting out of it is that we are, you know, kind of spending ourselves into debt while pissing off a lot of the rest of the world. And now they're starting to ally with each other. So that's what's actually playing out. This is probably the least responsible way to end the unipolar moment. But I guess what I would just say is like kind of the message of optimism in all of this is that what that moment allowed America to become. And it's not just that moment. I mean, there's several other major factors. Being Nixon taking us off the gold standard is a huge one that we're now, we were also like perfectly positioned. It was like 20 years after we went off the gold standard, the Soviet Union collapses. So now not only are we the world empire, but we also have this fiat currency machine where we can just print up as much money as we want to. Really nothing to kind of check government excess. But I don't think, you know, like I, I think that both logically we, we can kind of deduce this from the best economic thinkers. And also just empirically you can look at the 20th and even the 21st century and kind of see that like what actually creates wealth is free markets, cooperation, voluntary trade, and what the government class is parasitic in nature. They take from productive people by force or by the threat of force, and they redistribute that money to people who aren't producing. And I'm not saying that like, I'm not saying like when I, I'm not Even thinking like, these lazy bums on welfare, I'm thinking like these billionaires on welfare. But the, the idea that like drastic cuts in government spending or something like that, or like a drastic reduction in the power of Washington D.C. over the rest of the world, I don't think that would really hurt Americans. I mean, obviously the transition might be a bit wild and that's never the best thing, but ultimately I think that on the other side of that is that the, the American empire is a weight on the back of the American taxpayer. And so ultimately, I think that if that were to be greatly reduced, there would be a huge improvement in the liberty and the prosperity of regular people in this country, which is, I think, what we should all care about a lot more than, you know, those poor weapons manufacturers.
- [33:20]
Tom Bilyeu
So when you lay out that vision for what we're doing now, that's taking us in the wrong direction. I don't see a way to reverse that pain and suffering. So do you see any way for us to get out of our debt spiral, get out of our addiction to spending money we don't have by printing to not need the wars to keep GDP pumped sky high so that we can justify the amount of money that we're pumping into the system? Do you see a realistic way to reverse that or. Because this is how it feels to me. I am watching something that plays out in a really predictable debt cycle that Ray Dalio tracks. And it's, it's. I, I don't want to be defeatist, but it does feel a bit like the emoji where you sit back with your popcorn and you just watch what unfolds because I don't see a way to pump the brakes.
- [34:21]
Dave Smith
Yeah, I mean, I, I certainly get your point. And I, I have that feeling at times as well. I think, like, one of the things that really keeps me encouraged is that all of this stuff, like, as with all government authoritarian policies, all relies on propaganda. It's very important to the powers that be that they are able to propagandize their citizenry and convince them of things that are not true to be true in order to whatever the government policy is. And one of the things that we are living through right now, that we're kind of participating in right now, is that we live in a whole new world now where the state's monopoly on the control of information has been broken, really for the first time. And there are shows now like yours, that, that have a huge audience, way, way bigger than what a lot of the corporate media outlets are getting these days and that the, the propaganda can totally be challenged. This is something that's just very different than in the past. And so that gives me a lot of optimism as far as the actual system. You know, look, related to my first point, people are so much more aware of how corrupt the system is now than they've ever been before. People are so much more aware of the deep state and the dishonesty of the corporate media and how much wars are started based off lies to the point that everything is almost questioned now and that leads to other problems. But I think in, in total, the, the positives outweigh the negatives. And so how does the whole thing, how does this unsustainable thing get unraveled? I don't know exactly, but I would say that there's, you know, using the example of the Soviet Union, I mean, there was a big powerful government that controlled half of Europe and chunks of the rest of the world, and the whole thing was gone. And not too many experts predicted 10, 15 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union that it would be gone at by the early 90s. And so it is. You know, I think that the, the future always holds. I wouldn't say unlimited possibilities, but certainly many more possibilities than any of us are smart enough to foresee. And that I don't think it's that crazy that you would have some type of radical transformation in the United States of America. I mean, we've already had a radical transformation in this country just in the last 30 years. This is a much different country than what I grew up in, in the 90s. And I think that we're living through some pretty incredible times. There's a massive awakening and realignment happening right now. And so I do, I like to stay optimistic that we could see something like a radical decentralization of power in this country and something that could make it a much, a much better freer place.
- [37:28]
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- [37:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, interesting. I definitely want to hear about the decentralization, what you mean about that. I know a little bit about your background as a libertarian, but first I want to address what I'll consider the elephant in the room. So if you're most worried about World War 3, the thing I'm most worried about is that the debt cycle that we're in.
- [38:05]
Dave Smith
Is.
- [38:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Is man as close to inevitable as you're going to get? And I forget the exact percentage, but it's like 84% of the time it ends in war. Because what for people that aren't paying attention a lot to economics, the debt cycle works something like this. Usually you just had a war. And because you just had a war, all the debt is wiped off the table and everybody starts over. The tables turned over and people start building up from scratch. Now people don't have a lot, but they also don't have a lot of debt. And so now you get into this accumulation phase and it becomes the. The party time and people start bringing on debt. They discovered that they can print money, especially if you're the reserve currency like we are, where you can literally spread your losses internationally through inflation. You're just adding money to the money supply. We don't have to get super deep on that right now. But you keep building up that debt bubble. You keep bringing on debt, both personally at the governmental level, at the corporate level. And it gets to the point where we are right now, where even just servicing the interest on the debt becomes next to impossible. So you are in a situation where you have two options before you. You can hyper inflate your currency, because to make good on your debts, you will have to. You literally, even if you taxed everybody at 100%, you would not be able to meet your obligations. So you either have to hyperinflate the currency or you have to default. And the only option that you have out of those, historically speaking, is war. And so it can be a revolution or it can be a World War. One, two, three. And when I look at the numbers that America is putting up on the board, I'm like, you have an inevitability that you have to deal with. So when I hear an idea like, hey, we decentralized this, I don't know yet if I love that idea or hate it. I'll have to hear more about it. But we have to deal with the debt. Like, there must be a debt jubilee in here somehow. And so you'll hear people say that maybe the closest thing to the debt jubilee is going to be AI. That AI and robotics, they basically are like an untapped continent that we suddenly discover, hey, and it's effectively free labor. It's complicated as to why that would work, but it would work. But barring that, I don't see a happy path out of this.
- [40:36]
Dave Smith
What?
- [40:37]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you see?
- [40:38]
Dave Smith
Yeah, okay. So first I would just point out that look, in, in 1971, as I mentioned, Richard Nixon getting us off the gold standard, that was a default. I mean, that's. They. They painted it in, you know, a different way, but that's 100% what that was, is that we had said, hey, world here. That was the Bretton woods agreement, right? Was that will be the world, the world reserve. You can peg your currency to the dollar and you can redeem your dollar anytime you want. $35 an ounce for an ounce of gold. And then when the French wanted to come redeem it, Nixon was like, no, no, we're not giving it to you. We don't have it. It was a big, giant default. They just spun it as like the French are trying to undermine dollar stability or something like that. But it was like, yeah, but this was the deal that they were allowed to do it. And anyway, so we certainly. I'd say that a couple things on that. Number one, I think default is the best answer. So I think you're essentially right that you either have default or you have hyperinflation default or inflation. And at this point, with the level of debt we have, it would be hyperinflation. Default is not all sunshine and roses, but it's a lot better than hyperinflation, and it's a lot better than starting a war to get yourself out of it. The thing that does encourage me a little bit is that, you know, oftentimes you'll hear the political class talk about how divided we are, and that's certainly true, but they talk about how awful it is that we're so divided. Whoever their candidate is, is always supposed to be a uniter. They also talk about the problems with fake news and all of this stuff. And I think what's there, there's an admission of truth that's buried underneath there, which is that it was. It would be really, really hard for them to recreate, say, 2002 in. In 2002. For people who are old enough to remember as I am, there was a steady war beat, a steady war drums beat for the war in Iraq. We didn't invade till 2003, but all of 2002 was spent laying the groundwork so that you would have to be crazy to not know that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. And he was in on 9, 11, and he's about to pass these nuclear weapons off. You know, he's about to pass the weapons he doesn't have off to the terrorists he's not really friends with, and they're going to nuke Kansas. This is just a matter of time. Literally, the Vice President, Dick Cheney says just a matter of time. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Nay. And they got large enough levels of support for the war in Iraq that they were able to pull it off. And back then, the New York Times was selling it, CNN was selling it, Fox News was selling it. I mean, they just, they all powerful sources of information all got behind this war push. And of course, there was a tremendous, as there is now, but even a stronger push to demonize anybody who was critical of the war. If you weren't with George W. Bush, you were with the terrorists, they could not pull anything like that off today. And I think that's why they're so upset that we're, you know, that we're not unified. Because when the time comes, if you really want to sell a war, what you're going to need is a massive propaganda campaign, and you're going to need to get at least a large enough percentage of your population behind your war that you feel comfortable enacting the policy. And today we have Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and like, all of these people who are like, way, way bigger than the entire propaganda apparatus itself. And they, if they were trying to lie us into war again, those guys would be the first ones exposing it on their show. And so that does give me a little sense of hope that I don't know how easy it would be for them to pull off the, you know, leading us into a next war based off lies. Now, that doesn't mean it's impossible and they couldn't do it. And there wasn't gonna say, type of.
- [44:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Based on that assumption. Do you think if we had a Covid V2, that we wouldn't be lied into submission with that?
- [45:06]
Dave Smith
I think it would be much harder to do it again than it was the, the first time. You know, they, they tried to float out another round of lockdowns, like, kind of late into Covid. And it was just like, thoroughly, you know, they do these things where they put out, like, trial balloons. You know, there'll be like, articles about, like, well, you know, Joe Biden is considering a national vaccine passport. And then like, everybody's up in arms and they're like, no, no, no, we weren't going to do that. No problem. Like, they're always testing the waters. This happens a lot. And I think that, again, it's not that it's impossible, but it would be much, much harder to do Covid again than it was the first time. Because, you know, a not insignificant percentage of the population now recognizes that they were duped and now also doesn't trust any of the people who sold that to them. So I think it, it's not impossible, but it would certainly be a lot harder.
- [46:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so if we were going to get across this chasm, somehow we unwind the debt in some way that hopefully isn't wildly traumatic. Talk to me about what does decentralized power look like? I'm assuming your answer will come from a libertarian framework. So if you can give me the, the rubric by which you're coming to the conclusion of why this is better, I would love to understand that.
- [46:31]
Dave Smith
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, it's. Look, I, I think it's very consistent with kind of the founding documents of the United States of America and with like the, the basic premise being that man ought to be free and that government is an instrument of force. And if government is to exist, its only legitimate function is the protection of liberty. Decentralization. It could be on a spectrum. I mean, it, it could mean secession and a national divorce of some sort in the most extreme form, but it also could just mean strong federalism, something that is still enshrined in the Constitution, but we do not have at all anymore in this country. But the, you know, there's. I think there's a thing, some lawyer told me this once, but they said that on the bar, if, if there's a multiple choice and the answer is the 10th amendment, they say that's always wrong. Like, you never pick the 10th amendment if that's the answer, because that's just never how things actually work. But we do have an amendment to the Constitution that says, hey, like anything not expressly given to the federal government here doesn't belong to them, then that's for the states and for the people. And I think that particularly when you have such strong cultural divisions in the country, the, you're going to be like the idea that, okay, we're going to have an election every four years and then whoever wins rules over you. So if my team wins, then, you know, whatever, it's rural Alabama rules over Portland or, or Portland rules over rural Alabama. Well, that makes no sense on any level. And that's certainly not a recipe for liberty. And so which, much better is to just accept that, hey, there are many different cultures in this country and that they, they should not get to impose their wills on others. It's really, if you think about it, right. The same. It's just the logical conclusion of What I was saying before in opposing one world government, I mean, if you're not for one world government and you go, well, no, we have to have more competition, well then why shouldn't we just have a little bit more and a little bit more? And ultimately I think that the more kind of decentralized power is, the more likely you are to have a free, prosperous society. It's not, it's not a coincidence that the United States of America was such a successful country. And the model that it was started off of was being these United States, like they're, they're all together in a union, but there's all of these different little states that all have their own constitutions. And I think particularly today, as you've seen over the 20th century, but really drastically in the 21st century, a lot of the problems we're facing are the centralization of power in Washington D.C. and the antidote for that would be a decentralization of power.
- [49:31]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting. There's a story about Robert E. Lee. Originally not wanting to join the Confederate Army. He was considering going to the north. And he ultimately was like, I'm just more loyal to, to my state than I am to my country. I thought, whoa, that's not something that you would hear a lot of today. So heard understand that out of curiosity, where do you think, like is 50 states and geographic region as big as the United States? Is that the right subdivision or would you want to, and I'm talking not in theory, in practice, in practice, would you want to see that subdivided farther? Much farther?
- [50:17]
Dave Smith
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think certainly like 300 plus million people under one government is just way too many people. So I, you know, so again, I know you're asking me not in theory, but in theory I'd like to see it divided as small down as it could possibly go. I'd be happy to see it divided down to neighborhood blocks. In practice, I would support anything moving in that direction. However, there's, you know, there's also, there, there's, if we're talking in practice, then there's also the reality that like, okay, the feds might crack down on you, so you want to do this in an intelligent way where you're not going to like, you know, have your community invaded and dominated and brought back into the larger polity. But, but I do think that any of those types of, any of those types of divisions are good. I think that if it's probably not anytime soon going to come in the form of secession, but anything where Texas just takes a little bit more power for Texas to regulate themselves than the federal government or, you know, or California or whoever. I think that's a step in the right direction.
- [51:35]
Tom Bilyeu
There's a book called Infomocracy and it contemplates a world that's kind of like biology. I don't know if you know biology, but Balaji Srinivasan, it's a guy that talks about something called the network State. I man, you, you will have a very strong reaction to him. I think you'll like him, but you definitely should look him up at a minimum. Anyway, this book, the Infomocracy, toys with some of the same ideas of Balaji's idea of the network State where people really self organize, they form essentially governments. His thing is that it's not necessarily geographically that people will orient around. It will be around a value system where they connect to each other over the network. But even if you take that to be geographic, but it hyper fragments like you were saying, down into the neighborhood. That's what this book contemplates. It's a fiction book, but it did give me a sci fi glimpse into what a hyper decentralized world would look like. And if I'm honest, it seemed just unbearably burdensome to have to worry about what's legal and not legal a block away from you. And so even if you're just like walking to a mall which doesn't happen to be on your block, you might have to pass through three different, you know, block states. And I was just like, oh my God, like that seems like an absolute nightmare. Now I have tried to wrap my head around and you have not said the word anarchist. So I don't want to paint you with this brush, but I've tried to wrap my head around some anarchist principles from talking with Michael Malice. And it's one of those where I get it at the idea stage, but I am left asking, looking at societies as like a. What we see is, is the result of many civilizations, city states, countries, everything going through a long term evolutionary process. And they all seem to end in roughly the same place. And I'm just curious, why don't we see large scale, truly libertine groupings? Is there something about it that doesn't scale?
- [53:43]
Dave Smith
Well, I mean, okay, so just to. At the end there, I mean, I wouldn't be arguing for libertine groupings much as just for libertarian groupings, which there is an.
- [53:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Sorry, is there a difference there?
- [53:54]
Dave Smith
Yeah, yeah. I mean libertine usually comes with the Connotation of more like free love and that type of stuff. But so I would, I would say this. So first, Michael Mal's a very good friend of mine and I do essentially agree with him that I do. I think that the ultimate goal should be a voluntary society. And if you think about how essentially your, your interactions with everybody in your life, every type of business interaction and personal, every business relationship, every personal relationship you have in your life, down to the very, very complex ones, are all completely voluntary except for your relationship with criminals and the government. Criminals in the government are the only relationships that you'll ever have in your life where it is literally at the threat of violence, you are forced to do something. You're going to do something because they will throw you in jail if you don't do it. They will ruin your life if you don't do it. They will shut down your business if you don't do it. And then, of course, if you happen to be unfortunate enough to interact with like, criminals and they pull out a gun and say, give me your wallet, that's also, you know, a relationship predicated on force. Everything else is voluntary. This podcast right now we have is a voluntary reaction. You know, your people reached out to my people and we set it up. We're across the United States of America right now. There's also a voluntary relationship with our Internet providers, with the people who we bought our, our microphones and computers and all of this stuff with all of this. And it's pretty complex. And there really does not seem to be any obvious reason to me why. I mean, we all certainly recognize that our relationships with criminals are unnecessary and the goal should be to have as little of them as possible. And it's not self evident to me why, but the government must be this monopoly of force and that all the services, like all of these incredibly complex services from, you know, like, whatever. I don't even know what half of the technology I have in front of me is here because other people who I trust told me what to buy and I bought it and they set it up for me. But, but there's a lot of complexities to all of this yet. The services of say, you know, an elementary school and a road and your defense agency that has to be based off a violent monopoly. But all of these other services can be done voluntarily. So I think that it's an artificial distinction without a real justification for those services being delivered in that way. And then on top of that, I would say that, you know, look, you could, you could certainly write A novel about how scary it. And I haven't read that book, so I don't. I'm not like, commenting directly on it, but you could write a story about how scary and awful and burdensome it would be to have like, a different, you know, you know, like every, every little neighborhood having their own government. I could also write you a pretty scary novel about what it would be like to live under a government. You know, and there's. And history has lots of, of pretty scary examples of living under governments and how bad they can get. I would say that we live, let's say, in the United States of America. Obviously there's, this is under the umbrella of the federal government, but there are different laws across every state has lots of different laws. I'm not tremendously worried about that as I travel from state to state. It would not make sense for it to be designed in a way that you were like in a ton of trouble just for entering New Jersey, but then when you got back into New York, everything was okay. And I don't think there's much reason to believe that if there were instead of 50 states, let's just start with going to 150 states, that that problem would get much worse. Right now we can go through the United States of America and it's pretty well accepted, you know what I mean, like that, that you're kind of allowed to do the similar type thing that you're allowed to do. And then for other issues, there might be some questions like, am I allowed to, you know, make a right on red here? Or whatever. But I think that even traveling between different nations has become largely more of a hassle in the last 50 years than it ever was previously. And that's been because of the centralization of power and the growths of those governments, making it more difficult to leave and come in. So I, I just think that both in theory and in terms of like, you know, the, the practical reality, you're going to be better off with more decentralization. Now, that doesn't mean that there's no scenario in which anarchy could be bad or decentralization could be bad, but I think that the likelihood of it going bad is way lower than the likelihood of, of, of centralized power going bad, which has happened a lot more often.
- [58:57]
Tom Bilyeu
I certainly agree that centralized power can and will go bad. There's no doubt about that. What I'm trying to figure out is, is libertarianism the worst of the systems, except for everything else in the worst system except for everything else? Or is democracy the worst System, except for everything else. Because when I look at history, history is a John Mearsheimer stamped parade of realpolitik. And you don't have to read many books about the Mongols before you realize, oh dear Lord, there are people that will come through your village and they will rape and kill and just take everything from you. And so thinking of this as an evolutionary inevitability, it seems like we are always going to end with centralized power where we make the trade off for. I'm going to give up a ton of freedom in exchange for security. And once I make that trade, that slowly, over time, the government ossifies. It takes too much. You end up in the debt cycle, which we've already talked about. Like, that feels like what I know about humans, that that is the inevitable loop that we will always live in. And so it makes libertarianism, anarchism to me feel like, like a thought experiment that, yeah, if I could program out some of the human tendency where a, a typically strong guy with just sociopathic tendencies, he's gonna come take your. And all of a sudden you're gonna be like, well, I don't want that to happen again and we find ourselves back here.
- [60:33]
Dave Smith
Well, okay, so I probably would have agreed with you before guns were widely available, but I do think that that changes that equation entirely. And once you've got something like the United States of America, where you have, even with these large centralized governments, even with them, you have something, I don't know if anyone exactly knows something like 400 million guns in the country. And if you could imagine, you know, if we're talking about libertarianism or even anarchy here, if you could imagine abolishing all gun laws tomorrow you're going to have a lot more guns out on the street. And this makes, this makes self defense much more of a tenable idea. Like, like, much more of, like, oh, it's not that there would be these communities who are entirely vulnerable to a bigger, stronger guy coming in and taking all their stuff. They would actually be able to defend themselves in terms of, like, look, do things inevitably lead to centralized power and to giant powerful governments? Look, there's a strong argument to look around and say, well, hey, that's the situation we're in now. But I would, I'm, I'm a little hesitant to just buy into these inevitability arguments. I mean, again, you know, I use the Soviet Union as, as an example before, where it certainly seemed inevitable that the Soviet Union would exist forever. And you know that it wasn't. And you know My, a good friend of mine, Gene Epstein, who's a brilliant economist, he would always use the example of, of slavery. And he was like, you know, if you were sitting around in 1845 at the height of slavery and you were to say, hey, in the next 20 years slavery is going to be totally abolished in the west, people would think you were insane. I mean, that literally would have made no sense. People have been like, listen, this is inevitable. This has, this institution has been with humanity for all of its history. It is the way of the world. There is no way all of these people are going to give up on their free labor. And yet miraculously. But it really did happen. And you know, okay, yes, obviously there was a civil war in the United States of America. Most other western countries didn't require a civil war in order to abolish slavery. It's, it's debatable. Maybe we didn't need to have one either. But the fact is that the, the institution of slavery was abolished and again, people could argue that it was transferred into other forms or whatever, but still, I'm just saying for the, that really awful thing went away and didn't come back, at least for a while. And so I, I just, I'm a little bit hesitant to, to buy into this. Like, well, it's just inevitable. The, the truth is that the United States of America was the largest experiment in free markets and in individual liberty in the history of the world. And that doesn't mean it wasn't a perfectly free market country ever. And it wasn't a perfectly libertarian country ever. But there, if you look at the period of time between like the, the end of the Civil War and say the Woodrow Wilson administration, so from 1865 to 1910 or something like that, you had this giant country in the United States of America that had no income tax, no central bank, no federal regulation to speak of. The total spending from the federal government was like 2% of the national income or something like that. I mean, it was, by today's standards would be the most radical bare bones government. You know, like you could, you couldn't even imagine if someone proposed today to just be like, okay, year one, we're going to abolish every single department that we have here. You know, I mean, like none of this stuff existed. And in that time of like radical, by today's standards, radical laissez faire capitalism, we built up the, the most powerful country that the world had ever seen. It was the, the largest rise for the lot and life of the average person that had ever been seen in world history. Two levels of what, what would have been perceived as magical levels of prosperity just a couple of generations before that. And so look, it's, it's very hard. The primary reason I think it's very hard to get from here to there is that there's so much concentrate who benefit off the status quo and they would lose their power if they were to, you know, if we were to embrace libertarianism. But it's just so, it's like it's kind of been done before. We have way more technological advances at our disposal now than we did then. And I think nothing's inevitable. And so it's worth continuing to try to push for that.
- [65:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I, I agree that nothing is inevitable, that things are actually, I don't agree that nothing is inevitable. I do agree that you should approach the world as if nothing is inevitable. But I also agree that looking at history, it's, it's going to offer you something because you have tens of thousands of years of these tests being run and you can see, at least for recorded history, roughly what they look like. And I don't see societies going libertarian at scale. Again, maybe it works when you're small, but there is a question to be asked and answered, which is why do people tend to form larger and larger societies? Now, again, I'm not even saying that's good, but here's my thinking on why this happens. So to me, when I look at society, it is the answer to the question of what do weak men want? For two reasons. One, they either want to choose to be weak so they can focus on something else. So they don't want to have to develop their physical prowess to be a Spartan, to constantly think of being ready for war. So I won't even use weak as a pejorative. They just don't want to spend their time doing that. Right? Like, I don't consider myself war ready. So there are other things I want to do. And the other would be to specialize. Right? So I want to specialize, but that means that I need to be in a larger group so other people can do their specialization and hopefully I can get really, really niche and do something that I really enjoy. So we just see that over and over and over. Okay, so maybe not inevitable, but it's certainly something that we see people forming into. So now to I guess, really make this concrete, and I actually don't know how you're going to answer this question, so this is a very, very sincere question. If you look at something like Israel, Gaza, and what's going on there. If I were to go and pull the Palestinians aside and be like, all right, here's what you have to do. You've got to band together. You've got to have one vision. You've got to get everybody on the same team. You guys have to decide what you're going to do, whether it's war or peace. Like, this has to be a really galvanized energy and effort. It is not going to be a bunch of, like, hyper fragmented groups that they're going to have a way harder time. I'm going to want to give them one narrative, some mythology that pulls them together, a single aim, something that we can build towards, metrics that we can count. And so all of those are centralizing forces. And that's one. I'd be very curious if you think a libertarian approach there would be more effective.
- [68:21]
Dave Smith
So. Okay, so it's an interesting question. I would just say that there's, there's. And this is some point that Frederick Bastiat made in, in his work, but there, I just want to be careful to not kind of conflate society and the state or groups of people and the government, because there is a major difference there. And so I do think essentially that you are right, that we, we, we bind ourselves together in groups so that we can specialize and so that we can be more prosperous. I mean, that's a big part of how prosperity happens, is that you stop, you know, you become more and more specialized, and then you trade with other people who specialize. And obviously, like, you know, if we just go to, like, way back to the state of nature, if you have to hunt your own food and build your own furniture and knit your own clothes, you're doing everything not very well, and it's taking a lot of time to get it all done. But if you're just like an awesome hunter and somebody else is really awesome at knitting clothes, it's much more beneficial for you guys to trade. That type of, that type of, like, kind of coming together is heavily incentivized because it makes you all more prosperous and can be done voluntarily. But in terms of, like, the government being much more powerful, that isn't something that I. And I think this is something that people have a tendency to look back on. You know, Murray Rothbard is like a really brilliant historian, an economist. He, he wrote a lot about this. But people tend. It's like we tend to tell ourselves stories. And one of the stories will often be that if something was one way before, and then it became this way we go, well, we all decided to make it this way. And that's kind of the way the story is told. You, you can particularly see this when progressives argue about why we have a regulatory state or why we have an EPA or why we have all this. They'll, they'll kind of tell you stories like, they'll be like, like, well, we used to not have one, and then it was a disaster. And so now we have one because we know it was a disaster without one. But if you actually look at the actual history of almost any of these things, it's not 100% true, but it's like 99.9% true. If you look at how a government regulation came to be, it is almost never the case that all of the people stood up and just demanded that the government come in and regulate this bad businessman who was doing something bad to them. What it is almost every single time is that special interests from within that sector lobbied the government in order to get them into the business of regulating that sector, usually to make it harder for their competition or to give them some type of competitive advantage. It's not the case that, like, you know, whatever the. All types of different examples, you can look at this throughout history. And so I would just, I would be careful from telling the story that in any way we decided to have a more centralized government or something like that. That wasn't a decision made from the people. And there's really fascinating history about this, but believe me, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. morgan did a lot more deciding about having strong centralized government than like, the American people at some point just deciding that they, they wanted that. And obviously there's, it's a little more complicated than that. Like, people were propagandized. There were groups of people who were calling for more government. But really, in terms of what actually moved the needle in these cases, it's like, but as you know, today, you know, what Goldman Sachs wants the government to do, believe it or not, has a little bit more influence than like, what me or you might want the government to do. As far as, you know, talking about the situation in Gaza, I do get your point. Yeah. There in many ways it would be better if we could get everybody on the same page, at least in terms of strategy, to just be like, hey, listen, okay, I know you want to resist. Here's the smart way to resist. Like, the way you're resisting is not helping you guys at all. So maybe this way would be a lot smarter. You know, there, there's a a fair point to that, I would just say that. Is that. Is that achievable at all? Well, number one part of the reason why you would want that is because they're currently under attack, you know, and. And so that changes the calculation. That's not necessarily something you would want in peacetime, everyone to be acting exactly the same way. You'd kind of want people to be pursuing their own interests. But regardless, it's like the question really comes down to, like, if that is desirable, is it achievable, and what's the best path to achieve that? Because currently Hamas is like the gang with the most power there, and they're pretty into enforcing their will on other people. And even that doesn't seem to be working out very well. It's not like Hamas ever really had control of the Gaza Strip. They're kind of like a gang. They'd kill the people who were in their way or whatever. But I just don't know that, you know, and even when, you know, even when the Palestinians were trying to play ball more, it was never. You'd have some who wanted to negotiate, you'd have some who wanted to fire off rockets. And, you know, I don't know whether it's possible at all to kind of get everyone to buy into one strategy, but I don't see any evidence that forcing them to do it is going to work better.