#2025 - Dave Smith

Dave Smith (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Dave Smith (0:14)

What's up, brother?

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Good to see you, my friend.

Dave Smith (0:15)

Good to be back.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

Crack a leckon.

Dave Smith (0:17)

Well, I'm just having fun, dude. Great time at Mothership last night.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

That was a good time.

Dave Smith (0:21)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

That place is always a good time.

Dave Smith (0:23)

Yeah, I can't wait to go back tonight.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

I'm at Magical Portal, fun, fun, great fucking crowds, dude. The crowds were amazing.

Dave Smith (0:30)

Yeah, just incredible. Every time I've been there, and I've been there a decent amount now, always great crowds.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

Yeah, it's a fun place. Build it and they will come.

Dave Smith (0:38)

Yeah, well, you sure did.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

So we were on our way over here and I texted you that Purgosian thing.

Wild. But not unexpected.

Dave Smith (0:53)

Well, yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:54)

Is he definitely dead?

Dave Smith (0:56)

I don't think it's definitely. I think this is what people are reporting. I mean, the plane just went down. I wouldn't say definitely yet.

But I think a lot of us did expect after he kind of flirted with a mutiny against Vladimir Putin and then they kind of came to an agreement and he leaves, you're like, I don't think that guy has very long to live. Vladimir Putin doesn't seem to me to be the type of guy you can try to overthrow and then go, my bad, I think we're cool.

Joe Rogan (1:23)

What do you think that was all about?

Dave Smith (1:27)

I don't know, I really don't know. At first, they were spinning it like he was pissed off about the war, but that never really seemed to make sense to me. I think some type of power struggle and he kind of went for it in a pretty major way, started like destroying equipment and moving his forces toward Moscow and then they reached some agreement and they backed off.

And now a plane went down, so we'll see.

Joe Rogan (1:54)

We'll see. Yeah, if I was him, I wouldn't be going anywhere by plane.

Dave Smith (2:00)

Yeah, you would think, right?

Joe Rogan (2:02)

You should take a bus, bro.

Dave Smith (2:04)

Yeah, you should take a tank anywhere you go.

Joe Rogan (2:07)

You should be inside a safe, riding on a bus.

Dave Smith (2:11)

Yeah, what was crazy is when it first went down, so many people in the corporate press were like, this is it for Putin, he's done. Russia's collapsing because they're doing so bad in the war.

And all of those narratives seem to be completely disproven.

Joe Rogan (2:25)

Well, what's scary is what happens if Ukraine runs out of troops.

That's what's terrifying is like, how many more soldiers do they have left? How many more people can they force to fight that war? Like, what is the truth in terms of what are their losses? Because what you hear from people that are the true believers in the leftist movement is that Ukraine is winning and that Russia is doomed. We must support Ukraine.

And then what you hear from realists, particularly people that have been on the ground, they're like, it's a slaughter fest. It's horrific. And the ratio of Ukrainian dead to Russian dead is extremely imbalanced.

Dave Smith (3:11)

Right.

Joe Rogan (3:11)

That's what I'm saying.

Dave Smith (3:12)

In Russia's favor. Russia's killing a lot more than they're getting killed. And it's hard to know exactly. It's always hard in the fog of war to know exactly how many people are dying. It's usually not till after the fact, and they do the excess mortality numbers, and then you kind of figure out how many people actually died here. But it does seem, I think there's no question that Ukraine is doing better than would have been expected. Like say in the year 2010, if you had said, okay, Russia's gonna invade Ukraine, most people thought they would have folded in a couple weeks and it would have been over.

Ukraine has at least put up a fight to this point. And I think that that is because of the fact that, number one, NATO was training the Ukrainian military for years, ever since 2014, ever since Yanukovych government was overthrown. And number two, that we've poured an unlimited amount of resources into the war effort. But then that kind of leads to the question of like, wait, so, but if Russia still wins at the end of this, which it looks like they're going to, short of like US intervention, direct intervention, then what did we accomplish here other than just getting way more people slaughtered and drawing the war out way longer to kind of sacrifice Ukraine in an effort to hurt Russia? And it's crazy that the same people who support this war supported claiming that they really care about the Ukrainians.