Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Dave Smith: “Israel’s Goals Predict U.S. Wars Better Than Trump’s Instincts” | Impact Theory W. Tom Bilyeu
09 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The president of the United States of America has enormous power. Mocking Allah on Easter as you announce total war against the civilian population seems like a dangerous game to me.
What do you see as a relationship between the Jewish lobby and the military industrial complex?
Israel is an expansionist state. War is big business. Behind this door is forever war. There's huge money to be made here. And that's what we've been pursuing this whole time.
Dave Smith, welcome back. Oh, thank you. It's good to be back with you, brother. It's good to have you.
Chapter 2: How does the Israel lobby influence U.S. foreign policy?
So my goal here is not to debate whether Israel has influence over U.S. foreign policy. I think that it clearly has massive influence. But what I do want to figure out is whether that's the variable with the highest predictive validity for what Trump is doing in Iran. or whether there's a better model.
I think I have something that has higher predictive validity, but I would be very open to seeing that that actually isn't the way and that there's just something I'm missing. So where I want to start is if someone wanted to predict Trump's next move in the Middle East, what do you think is the most important variable that they should be tracking? Is it Israel's goals or is it something else?
Chapter 3: What role does the military-industrial complex play in American wars?
Essentially, the neoconservatives and the Likud party and the Israel lobby, more broadly speaking, for at least 30 years, openly, their goal has been to remake the Middle East. Since the clean break strategy, their goal was like, no, we're not doing Oslo. We're not doing a two-state solution.
We're going to remake the surrounding Arab nations, not just Arab nations, but Persian, the Middle East, Northern Africa. And we're going to remake them and take down the ones that are supporting the Palestinian resistance or supporting Hezbollah. And Donald Trump's goal was to get out of stupid regime change wars in the Middle East.
And both of them were very explicit about what their goals were. And yet here we find ourselves in a regime change war, a regime collapse war. that is clearly not in America's interest, clearly not in the region's interest, but it sure did allow Israel to take southern Lebanon in the last few weeks.
And so it seems to me that, yeah, what the lobby wants, what the Israeli government wants seems to have at least for the last 30 years
been the best predictor of the out of outcomes but look there's other things in there too i mean look the fact is part of the reason why the um the neoconservatives because you know if you remember i think we might even talked about this last time i was on but the neoconservatives i mean the self-identified neoconservatives from the Reagan, Bush senior, and George W. Bush administration.
They weren't old money guys. They weren't guys from the Council on Foreign Relations. They weren't the Rockefeller's guys. They weren't in that world at all. They were middle class kids who went to City College in New York City. But they made their relationships with the military industrial complex on their own. And so, of course, War is big business.
And, you know, whenever you get on the side of that, you're always going to be, you know, sailing with the wind at your back in DC.
Okay. And how do you see the relationship being between the Jewish lobby, which we're probably going to have to take a second to define, but we'll get to that in a minute. What do you see as a relationship between the Jewish lobby and the military industrial complex?
Well, I mean, you could say, so if you look at like, you know, like the guys like Bill Kristol, the neoconservatives who always had like a bunch of different think tanks in Washington, D.C. I mean, you can go look at who funds them. This is all public information. It's like all the weapons companies up and down funding.
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Chapter 4: How do economic factors shape U.S. interventions in the Middle East?
And that's a gift and a curse. You know, there's things about that that are nice and there's things about that that are really terrible. But
know i mean look if if somebody had just said to you like the adelson's give the president hundreds of millions of dollars and all they care about is israel and they love israel more than they love america and every day they'd go demand things on behalf of of israel because that's who they identify with you know you cannot these these billionaire jews living in america are actually essentially israeli spies you'd be like ah what was that like a nick fuentes
clip or something that went viral. Nope, that was the president of the United States of America, the one who's doing it right now, just openly says this, just openly acknowledges that. So then it's kind of hard to like... And people still go like, oh, you're blaming the Israel lobby for everything. You're like, what? I mean, I don't know.
The guy who's doing it is saying in his own words that that's what's going on here.
It's interesting. So here's why this feels important enough to like really press down the path. So what you just said as part of it is there's a whole bunch of influences, hard to know which one is the leading one.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the neoconservative agenda for U.S. foreign policy?
That if we just made that statement, I'd be like, I agree wholeheartedly. You also said that we have economics basically runs the world or money runs the world. I can't remember what exact word you use, but basically like, hey, money is the real player here.
If you just said that, I would agree totally because that's my punchline is if you want to understand what's happening right now, there's only two things you need to understand. And that is Trump wants to end up on Mount Rushmore completely unironically, like he wants to be the fifth head carved into Mount Rushmore.
And then he's going to get there by outpacing the inflationary spiral that we're in because nobody, not Republicans, not Democrats, nobody is going to reduce the budget. So for me- What I'll be attempting to do is basically sharpen that idea or get rid of it based on our time together, because I think you're super insightful on this stuff.
But where I come down is when I look at the way that every time the world breaks economically, There's a pogrom. Now, is it one for one? Maybe it's not quite one for one, but ooh, buddy, it gets real close. And so I look at that and I go, okay, why when economics starts to fall apart, do people turn against the Jews and so reliably throughout history?
Now, I've got my explanation, which I'll speed run. And then I want to bring it back to this moment in America and how we begin teasing out, okay, there's all these influences, but what are the ones that we really need to pay attention to? So the speed run for me as to why Jews get themselves in trouble historically, reliably over and over and over.
I do subscribe to the it just really makes a lot of sense if Ashkenazi Jews have a slightly higher IQ than the average. That certainly makes my following argument that much easier to swallow. So I do subscribe to that. And then if you're smart, one of the first things you realize is that economics is basically the whole game.
And so if you can go in and if you're trying to make things better for you, your family, and you're just being shrewd, I won't even go all the way to selfish. You're just being wise. you're going to master economics. I would say that to me. I would say that to you. I'd say it to anybody who will listen to me. Go get good at finance. Cool. So they put themselves at the center of that.
You've talked very eloquently about the whole idea of usury. It's like if American Christians or Christians in general don't believe that they can charge interest, but you have a group over here that's like, yeah, why wouldn't you? You facilitate modern economics, which has given us unbelievable prosperity.
So it's a great idea no matter how angry you get about the rates that they charge or whatever. It is a modern miracle that somebody figured out debt, that they figured out interest, absolutely incredible.
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Chapter 6: How does tribalism affect perceptions of political influence?
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Let's get right back into the action.
If you look at some of those polls where it really is like amazing how much support for Israel has collapsed, it's been since the destruction of Gaza. And so I just do think it becomes a very convenient excuse for a lot of pro-Israel people to say that, oh, this is just like all those other programs.
Like, it has nothing to do with the genocide in 4K that you are forced against your will to fund and watch. Like that, I mean, that seems to overwhelmingly be the obvious, like, you know, prime driver of what's at least happened over the last couple of years. And then there's also just a lot of other factors like this is I'm not a person who blames the Jews for everything.
And I've always been a guy who's like, no, what happens is essentially America created a world empire. We created a central bank and an income tax and a regulatory state and a military industrial complex and this huge mess. And it was ripe to be taken seriously. over by someone. Everyone's always jockeying for position.
I mean, when you have a government that spends over $7 trillion every year, it's the biggest organization in the history of the world, of course, everybody's going to be competing over who gets the levers of power there. Now,
israel honestly israel was a creation of europe it was a creation of um european empires and big bankers and all of that but that doesn't mean there weren't some people who really ideologically believed in it and so again you have all of these things going on at once and then the the other fact is just that In this game, which Israel did not invent, Israel was only created in 1948.
This has been going on for a very long time. But in this game of intelligence agencies and central banks and all types of the Epstein class, whatever exactly all of that is, I do think that the Mossad had a tremendous advantage that other intelligence agencies would have exploited if they had had that advantage. But you had a diaspora
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Chapter 7: What historical context is important for understanding current U.S.-Israel relations?
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yeah okay so it's all very interesting and you know i do think um look to to your point because there's a lot there's i'll just start with this but yeah look i do think like i don't think the israel lobby opposed the venezuela strike but it certainly wasn't the main driving factor of it and for that matter you know the israel lobby really wasn't the main driving factor in afghanistan they didn't really particularly care about uh the taliban ruling afghanistan
And I also don't think that backing the Saudi war in Yemen was largely driven by the Israel lobby. I mean, I've read a lot about it and I know this now people suspect that that one might have been, but really Israel's issue with the Houthis kind of came after all of that.
And from everything I've read about it, it was really our relationship with Saudi Arabia was really what pushed the Obama administration to start back in that, you know, Saudi Arabia was upset. Also, I mean, Israel was too, but they were also very upset about the Iran deal. And they were also very upset after toppling Iraq had basically just given Iran the entire region.
And so, you know, like, yes, there are other factors that play into this too. It's also...
You know, if your starting point is that Israel is the puppet master and has full control over the U.S., then yes, I think something like the Iran deal is going to kind of blow up that position because, well, if that's true, how come there was this thing they really didn't want, but they still got it anyway?
But if your starting point is just like they have way too much influence, then the exception kind of becomes the exception that proves the rule. I mean, you could... I could point to some example of where I did something that my wife really didn't want me to do. But the conclusion from that wouldn't be that she has no influence on me.
It would just be that in that one case, I didn't go along with the pressure she was putting on me because we had a disagreement or whatever. Now, to your point, you know, I also think and this is totally speculating, but I do think, you know, there are the political incentives and that's part of this reality here.
Really, and maybe part of this is like a miscalculation on my part, but last summer when Donald Trump hit us with the one-two punch of covering up the Epstein scandal and launching the 12-day war, a lot of people like me were like, well, screw you. We're done with you.
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