Dave Smith: Israel, Hamas, Ukraine, Russia, Conspiracies & Antisemitism | Lex Fridman Podcast #464

All the people who sold the war in Iraq, they lied us into war after a war, they've bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar, and like, no one loses their job. No one even gets in trouble over any of this. If you make everybody monsters and they're not human beings, well you can't do diplomacy with monsters. You can't make a dea- you can't negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans. Maybe there are times where you're not, you shouldn't negotiate, or you can't negotiate with humans, but it's better if you can. And, and, we could use a lot more of that thinking. Donald Trump has put a lot of political capital chips into the middle of the table that I can end this war. You know? And he's gonna look very, very bad if he can't. So he's very highly incentivized to get this thing done as quick as possible. You're fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you're fighting, and so the first step is to stop doing that. Like your cu- your cure is making the patient more sick. So stop doing that, and then let- let's see if maybe we could heal. Where are the tapes? Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes? This guy was clearly taping people to blackmail them. Like why does anything need to be redacted for national security? Like I'm sorry, you're telling me there's a pedophile ring and we can't tell you everything about it for national security? Why would that be related to national security?

The following is a conversation with Dave Smith, an outspoken, and at times controversial anti-war Libertarian, comedian, and podcast host. This is a Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Dave Smith. You are a long time Libertarian. Uh, perhaps an anarcho-capitalist?

Yeah.

We can talk about that. Can you, uh, explain the different variants, flavors of, uh, 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, uh, people like Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell. Pe- those were, I think, some of the more mainstream figures. And then there's kind of like the Ron Paul brand of Libertarianism, which is kind of distinct from that other camp where they're much more of an emphasis on foreign policy. All of them kind of fall into the, um, radical minarchist points of view. And then there's Rothbardian, anarcho-capitalist. Then there's also like a David Friedman, who's an anarcho-capitalist, but from a completely different perspective than Murray Rothbard. I would probably be most, um, most closely like with the Rothbard school, which is very similar to Ron Paul, um, but even maybe a little bit further in that, you know, the very little bit of government that Ron Paul might support.