Lex Fridman Podcast
#464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism
Wed, 09 Apr 2025
Dave Smith is a comedian, libertarian, political commentator, and the host of Part of the Problem podcast. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep464-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/dave-smith-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Dave's X: https://x.com/ComicDaveSmith Dave's YouTube: https://youtube.com/DSmithcomic Dave's Instagram: https://instagram.com/theproblemdavesmith Dave's Website: https://comicdavesmith.com/ Part of the Problem Podcast: https://partoftheproblem.com/ SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Call of Duty: First-person shooter video game. Go to https://callofduty.com/warzone Tax Network USA: Full-service tax firm. Go to https://tnusa.com/lex Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (00:10) - Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (09:32) - Libertarianism (10:47) - Ron Paul (13:59) - Military–industrial complex (20:53) - War on Terror (33:12) - China and Taiwan (41:00) - Just war theory (48:09) - Israel and Gaza (1:05:35) - Douglas Murray (1:13:29) - Hamas (1:29:48) - Hitler and Stalin (1:32:01) - Darryl Cooper (1:41:13) - Antisemitism (1:54:46) - World leaders (2:07:21) - Jeffrey Epstein (2:15:24) - Sam Harris (2:28:07) - Ukraine and Russia (2:47:32) - Joe Rogan (3:00:01) - Conspiracy theories (3:17:52) - Hope PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
Chapter 1: Who is Dave Smith and what is his libertarian perspective?
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Chapter 2: What are the core ideas of Ron Paul's libertarianism and anti-war stance?
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Dave Smith. You are a longtime libertarian. perhaps an anarcho-capitalist, we could talk about that. Can you explain the different variants, flavors of libertarianism and where you stand among those variants?
Yeah, so there's almost like anything, like with left-wing schools of thought or right-wing schools of thought, there's many different camps and different thinkers. And so within the kind of broader theme of libertarianism, there was a lot of influence from people like Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell. Those were, I think, some of the more mainstream figures.
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Chapter 3: How does the military-industrial complex influence U.S. foreign policy?
These were a lot of the same people who had voted for George W. Bush twice and supported the war and even mocked their liberal, you know, fellow countrymen for not being on board with it. And, and a lot of that was the work that Ron Paul did and people waking up to, um, the, how, how messed up all these wars were. And I think that at least from there, there were a couple of major things for me.
Okay. At the time. So I was like, I was a young man when I first found Ron Paul, I was, I was in, uh, 2007, uh, was when I first saw him and then started obsessively reading all of his books. And so I was young. I'm born in 83. So what would that mean? 23, 24 when I first met him. So I was a young guy.
And at least for me at the time, there were like kind of two categories in my naive mind where, okay, there were like the liberals who supported big government at home, but were skeptical about you know, big government abroad or they're skeptical about wars.
And then there were the conservatives who said that they supported small government, limited government at home, but we're always on the side of whatever the next war is. And at least for me, and I think for a lot of people of my generation, Ron Paul was the first guy who came along and said like, no, I'm for limited government here and abroad. And it was kind of like a portal.
where you could like access a different perspective on the world. And then once you saw that, you were like, wait, that's actually what makes sense. It doesn't make sense to like, what is it exactly that like all the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and even like Milton Friedman and guys like that and Thomas Sowell. It's like you want a constitutionally limited world empire empire.
Like that's what you guys stand for. Cause that doesn't, that doesn't fit together at all. And so why is it that we took, we were taking this as a given. And then of course, the more you, you look into it, you realize that like, okay, there. Those two things do make sense together.
And then also that kind of like in the initial wave of like the original progressives, you know, look, people like Woodrow Wilson or FDR, these were people who were pushing big government at home and big government abroad. And that actually made much more sense as a cohesive worldview. And to oppose that would be. the Ron Paul worldview.
And then the other thing for me, and this was actually, this was my introduction to Ron Paul. And this too, to me was like kind of a portal in a way it was, it was a way, at least in my naive, not fully functioned brain or fully developed brain at 24 years old or whatever. Um, it was a way for me to kind of get like, like I tapped into something that was outside the empire. And I had, um,
I had heard a lot, you know, I was already against George W. Bush and I didn't like the war. I had already figured out, you know, I think this war in Iraq is bullshit. And I think that we were lied into it. And so I kind of got that. And then there were liberals and left-wingers who I knew.
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Chapter 4: What is the ethical debate around the Israel-Gaza conflict and October 7th attack?
Well, so to push back a little bit, throughout human history, there was also a thing, you look at the Roman Empire, where just the cultural values were different, where military conquest was seen... as a good thing. So, like, we just almost assume in the United States, war has been framed in the defensive sense. Like, where offensive war, we're not doing that anymore.
You make a fair point. It's certainly true that throughout human history, there's been, like, overt... empire building and wars of conquest and things like that. But I guess I'm just saying at least even there, you would have some type of sell of like why we're going to go take these resources and why that will be good for us.
Whereas the idea that they're like Kuwait just needed to be defended by the Americans seems so it seems so hard to convince anybody. And yet they were able to do it. If you read, like, neocon writing in the 90s, it was very interesting because they would tell the truth a lot more. And they were... Essentially, I think... There was the Soviet Union had just collapsed.
It was what what Charles Krattenhammer dubbed the unipolar moment. There was like a lot of there was excitement. There was a feeling of invincibility. And also the neocons weren't in power after 92, really. I mean, they had a little they were in the George H.W. Bush administration, but after 92, they really weren't. So they're just writing at these think tanks.
And it just didn't seem as, you know, like they weren't as guarded. There weren't like these accusations of you're a war criminal or something like that.
But what he said, what Jonah Goldberg agreed with was that every I think the statement was every 10 years or so, America's got to find a puny little country and put them up against the wall just to let the rest of the world know that we mean business. And that was actually their mentality.
I'm sure there's people that agree with that. I happen to disagree with that. But the drums of war are beating a little bit over Taiwan and China.
More than a little bit, yeah.
But there I can't even see a justification for a just war. What is the long-term benefit to society? if you do military intervention.
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Chapter 5: What arguments are made for and against Hamas's role in the conflict?
When Vladimir Putin starts talking about like, hey, if you keep pushing the idea of Ukraine joining your military alliance, I'm going to invade that country. The goal there or the move there would be to be like, OK, we'll stop talking about that. Is there something else that we can agree? You know, like, is there is there a way that you will promise you won't do anything to them?
And OK, and we'll promise we won't bring them in our military. Like, that's the goal. You don't just go like, no, fuck you. We're doing it anyway, over and over and over again until they do the thing.
I think we got to this discussion from the military industrial complex and military intervention and Ron Paul before that. If you could rewind a little bit, is there any amount, according to you and according to various flavors of libertarianism, is there any amount of military intervention that's justified, that's okay?
Um, well, I would say, okay, so at least to me in, in terms of like pure libertarian theory or just in terms of like what I think is right or wrong, like there is such thing as a just war. Um, the most obvious, uh, example of that would be like, you're invaded by a military and fighting them off. Um, so in, in that sense also, like, even if you want to, if you want to
kind of isolate from everything else, from, you know, all of the awful U.S. policy toward Russia post-Soviet Union to all of the, you know, NATO expansion and color-coded revolutions and all of these things. If you want to, you know, Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, I do think the Ukrainians have a right to fight and protect Ukraine. their land.
There's an aggressor there, and you have a right to defend yourself. So certainly in that sense, I think the American Revolution was a just war. I think there can be just wars. In terms of pure libertarian theory, I think I would say that, look, you never have a right to kill innocent people. That's never morally okay.
Now, there could be a scenario, just like this is true in life in general, right? There's lots of things that you don't have the right to do, but you could come up with some scenario where you might be in a position where you have to do it because there were all of these extenuating circumstances. You could think of something where like,
You remember the Saw movies where they used to, you know, these crazy like horror scenarios, but it's like, okay, so there's a person, you know, an evil bad guy has buried a key inside this person and you have to kill that person in order to get the key in order to unlock these 20 people to let them out of a cage. Now, look, you still don't have a right to kill people. It's horrible and wrong.
And what you did there was still evil. But if you were taken to trial over it, you could probably explain to a judge and a jury be like, I know, but the situation I was in was either these 20 people were going to die or this one person was going to die. And under that situation, I chose to save the 20. So like, in other words,
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Chapter 6: How can peace be achieved in the Israel-Palestine conflict?
But the bottom line is that Israel hasn't occupied Palestine for like a few months after a war or even a couple of years after a war while they're figuring out what we're going to do with them. It's been over 60 years. We're talking about a one week long war or a day short of a week long war in 1967. Israel's had control of them ever since.
And much like in the same way that like if you kidnap someone and you lock them in your basement and you don't feed them, you murdered that person. So in other words, stated differently. You're not allowed to kidnap people and lock them in your basement. But once you do, you take on a responsibility to feed those people. You know what I mean?
Like you can't, you're not allowed to keep someone and not feed them. That is a worse charge than just keeping them. And so yet, anyway, I guess my point is, The solution to that, if you go like, well, I'm a bad guy if I fund Hamas, I'm a bad guy if I don't let the aid in, was to let the reputable international aid organizations bring aid in to the people of Gaza.
Don't pressure the Qataris to send in briefcases full of cash. Allow... internationally recognized, reputable human rights organizations who are lining up trying to do it. Stop turning them away. Let them in. And this is just, it's so long past due. I mean, like, it's just, I'm not, like, defending Arab terrorism. I think it's really, it's a tragedy that the Arabs embraced terrorism.
I don't think it's unique to them. And in fact, you know, I think it was the, um, the Zionist militias who introduced terrorism to that part of the world. But there was also like there look, terrorism persists because it works. And this is true with state terrorism and with non-state terrorism. You know, it's like there, it, terrorism has often worked for people.
The, I think the thing like early, I think early Yasser Arafat, I know is very influenced by, um, the Algerians. who successfully kicked the French out at embracing terrorism. And it was almost like the major miscalculation of those Palestinian Arabs who did embrace terrorism was that this isn't the French
This isn't the French hanging out in some colony with their home country back home, where maybe a few acts of violence could work enough to, you know, the liberal population back home is like, oh, I really didn't like the response to that terrorism. We killed so many people. Forget it. This is too much of a headache. Let's get out of here. The Zionist settlers were there to stay.
They weren't going anywhere. They weren't going back to Eastern Europe. You know what I mean? They weren't, they were just that. And so it's a tragedy that this whole thing went the way it did. But you always whenever you're talking about like a conflict like this.
The person who has the or the party who has the power is the one who needs to make concessions, you know, and the it's just indefensible that the status quo of the Palestinian people having no rights. Literally no rights. Being ruled by a government that they do not get to vote for or against. No right to do commerce with the outside world. No freedom of travel. No freedom of movement.
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Chapter 7: What is the controversy around calling Israel a democracy?
We'd love to make a deal with Israel, but you gotta stop doing this to the Palestinians so my own people don't rise up against me. So I think if the Israelis were like, fine, we'll do a two-state solution or something like that, I think Saudi Arabia couldn't wait to broker. In fact, they proposed a two-state solution just a few years ago.
I mean, they would love to be a part of that, normalize relations. Amongst the Palestinians... which again, I think this had been accepted multiple times, at least by their leadership. It's like, yeah, you're going to have to accept that you lost in 48. You're going to have to accept that you lost in 47. You're going to have to accept that the state of Israel does exist.
And you're going to have to accept that the right of return is not going to literally mean that everybody can go back to where they were. And what Israel is going to have to concede is that It was awfully fucked up that they kicked a lot of people out of their land and that the whole a land for people for a people without land was never true.
That was just a slogan that made that felt good to avoid what you guys actually did. And the fact that it was inexcusable that you guys occupied these people for 60 years and that has to end immediately.
I interviewed Douglas Murray recently. He just wrote a book on Israel and Hamas called On Democracies and Death Cults. He makes what I think is a strong pro-Israel case, focusing on Hamas as an evil organization, evil for its corrupt leadership, who's essentially stealing money
from the Palestinian people and allocating the money that is there towards terrorist militaristic operations versus like building up Gaza. Can you steel man the case for and then against this perspective? Sort of centering, we've been talking about the people, about centering around Hamas, which is like this extremist religious organization.
The perspective being like they need to be, as you mentioned before, eliminated before any progress can be made.
Okay, so if I were... So Steel Man, Douglas Murray's case. I would say... Well, I guess the case is right. Look, Hamas is a fanatical death cult, essentially, which I do think is a fair description of them. There is no question that they have pursued... They have they have pursued a path that was just devastating to their own people.
And there's no question they have not spent the resources they have on their priority has not been uplifting their own people. Their priority has been, I think, essentially antagonizing Israel into this overreaction so that they can turn world opinion against Israel. I think they've been very effective at doing that. And.
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Chapter 8: How is antisemitism manifested today and what influences it?
I get to say that what I want the rest of the body, but there's that I had that. No, I'm well, I don't. Well, no, I mean, my beef with the Chinese government would not be that they don't hold regular elections. My beef with them would be that they silent speech that they, that they put people in camps and things like that. The surveillance, that stuff. Um, I think, look,
When you call Israel a democracy, which I guess is right in the title of his book, and full disclosure, I haven't read the book, but I have listened to some of his thoughts on this stuff, I think you run up against a real problem, which is that the creation of the state of Israel, even though he tried to walk away from those comments, as Norm Finkelstein called out Benny Morris for writing in his book 1948, which is a great book,
his words were the Zionist project always knew it was going to involve transfer. That was Benny Morris's words. Now, when, when Finkelstein was grilling him on this, on your podcast, he kind of said like, yeah, but that doesn't mean ethnic cleansing. That could be voluntary transfer that, you know what I mean? Like, but the point is the Zionist settlers and they all, they spoke about this openly.
They all knew they had a major problem, which is like, Well, you can't create a Jewish state if it's like 50-50, which is and in all of Israel, it was much less than 50-50. But even in like the the Israeli portion of the partition recommendation, it was very close to 50-50.
Now, you can't really have a Jewish state with a 50-50 voter base because now you're just kind of in a breeding war for the next generation. And or, you know, like or like who turns out the vote. any more than we could hope. It would be the prospect right now of making America an official Republican state or an official Democrat state. Well, how are you going to do that, man?
It's like 50-50 between the two. And so I think what Benny Morris was saying was that they always knew some of these Arabs are going to have to get moved out of here so that we could have more of something, which ultimately where they got to like an 80-20, which is pretty much what Israel's maintained the whole time.
Now, Benny Morris could quarrel about whether that necessarily meant voluntary, but when it happened, it wasn't voluntary. OK, so like when it actually happened, in effect, it involved a massive amount, something somewhere between 700 and 800000 Arabs being forcefully evicted out of this area. Now, that's one thing, you know, a lot of nations are started on some things like that.
I suppose if you just did that and then you were left with your 80 20 split and you go, but we have elections from here on out. I guess you could claim it's a democracy. Still seems like kind of gaming the democratic system a little bit. You know what I mean?
Like, if I just deported 80% of Democrats and then say, look, Republicans win every election, you might be like, yeah, dude, but you didn't exactly get there democratically. You got there through force. But forget that. I'll let that one go and just say, I'll call you a democracy if you just kept being a democracy like that moving forward. The real problem is the occupation that starts in 1967.
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