YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Smith

lines on the record: 218
first: 2025-04-09
most recent: 2025-04-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What are you doing? Are you trying to make people more sympathetic to Israel? Because that's the if Rabbi Shmooley was working for Adolf Hitler or something like that, it would all make perfect sense. You were like, oh, I get it. You sent this guy out to make everyone hate Jewish people. And then like, it's just, there's just a very, and then with the Jew hating post too, it's just, yeah, it just feeds right into the opposition side of how to caricature. You know, it's like, oh, so their game is they'll smear everybody who's a critic of Israel as being a Jew hater. So your answer is to just really be a Jew hater. Like, all right, I don't think that's helping.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're secretly working for the other side. Like, if you, when you see the Palestinian protests and they're chanting death to America and all this stuff, you're like, what are you?”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm not, I don't want to be clear disclaim this. I'm not saying this is the worst thing about people who are Jew haters on Twitter, but just from a personal perspective, I'm like, guys, you are not helping me, man. Like, it's like I'll get people in my comments who I think are trying to, like, catch my back, who just don't know I'm Jewish. And then, like, I'll say something critical of Israel, and then someone will argue with me, and they'll be like, oh, look, a Jew came in here to defend Israel. And I'm like, dude, first of all, do you're like literally, you might as well be working for Masad. You literally make the entire, you make the movement who's criticizing Israel look terrible, dude. Like, you are literally the enemy that they would like to have. And so there's a very weird dynamic in the Israel-Palestine conflict where all of there's so many of the loons on both sides who almost seem like...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's annoying. No, I agree with that. And I'm sure I'm not without my own bias in this because I like, but from my own self-interested perspective, I'm not saying this is the main reason to be annoyed with them or anything like that, but what I personally get is all types of self-hating Jew, Nazi apologists, all this, literally just because I criticize the way Israel's conducting this war. So I think that's like insane. But then I also feel like...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if mean stuff on Twitter is our great burden to bear, I don't think we should be talking about it like we're in the middle of Nazi Germany or something like that. So I do think people get hysterical about it.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weirdly, it also always ends up hurting the person. It's not good for you. It's not good for your soul. So I don't like seeing that stuff. But then I also think, you know, like, I was saying before about there's like this hierarchy of outrages that you got to have in order to think and act. You have to kind of put these together. And I just hear a little bit. It's something that despite being described as a self-hating Jew, I am really not. I love Jewish people. I love Jewish culture. I've benefited a lot from it. It's in many ways made me the person I am. And I think made it's influenced some of the best parts of me. But there is like a whininess and a hysteria about this stuff that I think is just like not healthy. I think it's not good. I've told many Jewish friends and family this privately, but it's like the way I look at it is like, I'm an American. This has been a wonderful country to be Jewish. Jews are doing exceptionally well in this country. We are 2% of the population are so, and we are thriving by any metric.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know sometimes people would argue where the thing I said in the beginning about the terrorists don't hate us for our freedom, they hate us because we're over there. And people would say, that's just what Osama bin Laden says. He just says he hates us for our military. But he really just hates us because he's an Islamist and we're free people or whatever. And he'd be like, okay, well, even if that's what's in his heart, that sure is his recruiting stick. That sure is how he gets other people to blow themselves up. And so even if you want to say, which might very well be the case, that some of these people just hate Jews, and it wouldn't matter if Israel was at war with Gaza or not. It's like, okay, but that sure is their recruiting shtick. That sure is how they get other people to go look at what these Jews are doing in our foreign policy. So I would, I don't know. There's a lot going on. I do think racialism of all different forms is stupid and wrong. It always just leads to sloppy thinking and bad results. It's always kind of ugly.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is the case that America has fought many wars over the last seven years with Israel playing a very influential role in us fighting those wars. And this was like a scheme that was cooked up by the neoconservatives and the Lakudniks in Israel that we would go through this path. But this has been confirmed by four-star general Wesley Clark. He literally said it was a study paid for by the Israelis that we were going to topple seven countries in five years and we didn't get there in five years, but we've made attempts to topple all of those countries since then. You know, you see, Trump's bombing the Houthis because they're pissed off about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and so they're trying to shut down their straits or whatever. And it's like, so we're just bombing another group on behalf of Israel. And if you really are concerned about the rise of Jew hatred, I would say like, look, it's much like...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like kind of stupid, especially when you're talking to Tucker Carlson. You know, this is like for an American audience. You know how much that does not resonate with Americans being like, we have a historic claim over another. Our entire society is founded on we think that's bullshit. Like that's the entire history of our society. It's like, no, it doesn't matter. Sorry. Like literally read the Declaration of Independence. It just refutes everything Vladimir Putin said in the first 30 minutes. Like our view of the world is that God wants us to be free. And we get to overthrow governments if they're infringing on our rights. So that was stupid. But then when he's talking about NATO enlargement and bringing Ukraine into the American military alliance, you're like, okay, he's got a legitimate point there. We would not allow one of our neighbors to be brought into China or Russia's military alliance. And so likewise, when it comes to those guys, I do think that you almost, look, it is just...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm not saying like the guy who posts Jew Haiti stuff on Twitter is the same as them. I'm just saying in all of these situations, you always kind of got to separate like what are legitimate grievances and what are like, okay, you're wrong on that and you shouldn't be doing that. You know, like, so it's pretty easy for me to like, if I listen to like the Putin interview with Tucker, I thought his whole 30”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet will be the one group you could just stomp all over us. We're the bad guys. And that's part of the reason why I always opposed the woke insanity. I mean, first and foremost, just because I think it's wrong. I think it's wrong to be shitty to people based on their racial group. And that includes white people too. But then also you're like, you don't see that this is going to result in something bad. So there's that. But I mean, clearly, and it was weird to me is that I guess it's because a lot of the people who are the most upset about the anti-Semitism also happen to be supporting Israel. Like there's a big correlation between that. But clearly, that's a huge factor in this. It's not a coincidence that all of this rose up while Israel is just conducting this brutal campaign with our weapons and money. And so I always think with these things, whether it's with Putin or with Al-Qaeda or with whoever.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or when I was in my early 20s, that the school, the faculty, the politicians, Hollywood, all of them embraced racialism. You know, they all said we're playing identity politics, and it is okay to dice people up along these racial lines and have that first and foremost in your mind, you know? There is this weird feeling over this last year and now with Trump being re-elected that like we snapped our fingers and wokeism went away or something like that, but these guys still came up in this era. And there was, it was always the case that like one of the dangerous elements of playing this game was like, you think you're going to play this and that like young straight white men aren't going to start playing this game too? Why the hell would they not? Why would they just accept we'll just sit here while everybody else is allowed to have a racial identity and a grievance about it?”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, you know, yeah, concerning and troubling and all of that stuff, but then you also see people who will be asking completely legitimate questions or making completely legitimate points that are called anti-Semitic. And then that, I think, does not help the dynamic at all, because now you're almost like, oh, there's number one, you just kind of, you make the word meaningless, you take away the disincentive for anybody else to actually be a Jew hater. I mean, I think there's a lot going on. You know, one of the things is that for young white men in America today, they've lived through the years of real insane progressive wokeism. And so, you know, which is something like I'm 42. It's just a different thing for me. Like I come from a different culture in a different time. That just simply was not the case that when I was a teenager or when I was in college,”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard to tell. I mean, I don't know. I don't know how you even figure it out. And I think this is one of the problems with outrage culture. It's kind of one of the unintended consequences of it is that now you just have no way of knowing who's saying this just to get a rise out of you or who really sincerely means it or who's some version of both. Then there's also, it's like there's so many weird dynamics because there's no question like I see it all the time. I mean, I see a level of like Jew hatred on Twitter that I've never seen before in my own replies and other people's things. And that's interesting. Like first off, you're like, okay, what's going on here?”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet, the only ones who ever have dropped them are us. I was arguing with one guy on a podcast, and he said that. He goes, You can't allow dictators to have nuclear weapons because they might use them. And I was like, but we are the only ones who ever used it. And he goes, ah, come on. That's naive or something. Like, wait, what? Shouldn't that be pointed out? And I don't know. I mean, I'd prefer Iran not get nuclear weapons. I think we're pushing them to probably want to pursue that. And I also think there's been a lot of propaganda about the nuclear program. I know, at least since the 90s, according to Netanyahu, they've been five years away.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trump is Hitler, Hamas is Hitler, except the problem is that none of them are Hitler. None of them are even close. It's just totally different.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Situation appeasement is wrong and aggression is good. It doesn't follow from that that that's the only lesson of history and that now it's just okay to slaughter civilians. Like it's okay to go to total war against a civilian population. Catastrophes and like, you know, and it's always, it's not just like, you know, I mean, I guess it's just in some ways there might be something positive about the fact that everybody's always called Hitler if they're bad. You know what I mean? We make Hitler the face of what is evil eternally or something. He really does play the role of the devil in our society in a strange way. There is like, you know. Saddam was the next Hitler and Gaddafi was the next Hitler, and Bashar al-Assad was the next Hitler.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I constantly, I mean, I've never, I don't think I've done a bunch of Israel-Palestine debates. I don't think I've ever done one where World War II wasn't invoked and where that wasn't like, well, I mean, Dresden, Hiroshima Nagas Agassy, you're going to tell me it's not okay. And immediately, just if you just look at it like that, like let's say the official narrative is 100% true in World War II. Let's even say every aspect of the official narrative is really true. Like the lesson of World War II is that we should have gone to war sooner, which is essentially, right? Like the dominant mainstream narrative that Chamberlain is the failure. That was the problem, the appeasement. Churchill was the solution. If only Chamberlain had been Churchill or if only we had gone to war with Germany and, you know, whatever in 1933, we would have just, it would have been better. Okay, let's say all of that's true. It still doesn't follow from that that therefore in every”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, that's a fair debate to have, and it'd be interesting to see you two kind of talk about that. It might not even debate it, but just have a conversation about that.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This, but I don't think I will. I really have trust that Darryl will handle this responsibly. And in fact, I think that he might be, and not because he's like involved at like this is his angle or what he's attempting to do. I think just that he's going to tell the truth and the truth will take you where it takes you. I think he's actually going to probably serve a function of bringing a lot of those types kind of back to reality and bringing them back to being like if you think he's going to be excusing the atrocities of the Nazis in this thing. I just don't think you're going to be happy with the end product if that's what you are coming into it for.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say this to be provocative sometimes to kind of rib my buddy Jocko, who's like Anglo-Saxons of this kind of gets to him. He goes, and I'm being a bit hyperbolic when I say this. But I'll sometimes say that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II. Now, he didn't commit the most atrocities. He wasn't like the worst person there, but he was a guy who was hell-bent on kind of this thing becoming what it ultimately became. Whereas like this might have just been an invasion of Poland. This may not have been this whole cascade of like the worst thing that ever happened in human history. Now the retelling of that is always people go, he said Churchill was the chief villain of the war. But it's like, no, not exactly. Like he, you know what I mean? What he's making a point, and I think he's putting out right now a long series on World War II. He just put the prologue to it, which was excellent, by the way. And I really just have, you know, listen, if after it's out, maybe I'll come back and regret saying.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I listened to a couple episodes of it and really enjoyed it. And then it was Scott who was like, dude, you got to check out his podcast, Martyr Made. It's like the best history podcast. And I ended up listening to the first thing I listened to of his was the fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem. He's done a few things on Twitter where he's kind of like shit posting and stuff like that. But when you listen to his work, like when he lays down like, I'm going to put together this thing, I'm going to take years to put together like a long presentation on the history of this conflict or the history of this. He has the utmost responsibility in the way that he tells the story and the way he presents it. I cannot understand how anyone would listen to his work and come away with the feeling that this guy is any type of like Jew hater or Nazi apologist or anything like that. It's just not who he is. What Darryl said on Tucker's show was that he goes, you know,”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The talker interview. Yeah, yeah. So, well, Darryl, I was just a big fan, and still I'm really just a big fan of him. We chatted like a few times and I interviewed him on my podcast. And I consider us friends. Martyrmaid podcast is his show, and it's just phenomenal. I've found out about him from my guy is Scott Horton, who's a very close friend of mine. think the best person on war in the country. He's just a genius. He runs the libertarian institute and he's also been the editor at antiwar.com for many years now. So he first told me about Daryl and that what I knew of Darryl was just that he did a podcast with Jocko. And so they did their show together.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that true? They actually broke it down to that 70%. But the 30% was being the worst mass murderer in human history. That's such a communist thing to do”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that the second night? I'm not sure that's officially known. Do we actually know that Mao killed anybody? I mean, all right, I'll say it. Here we go. I'm going to blow my funding. Bad guy, that Mao Say tongue. Do not care for him.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision at the time to ally with Joseph Stalin when he had already done the worst things that Joseph Stalin had done, or at least a lot of the worst things he had done. I guess there were a lot more in the war as well.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as my buddy Daryl Cooper demonstrated, I think we can have a reasonable civil discussion about these things without anybody blowing their lid. We can all just talk. No, but I mean, look, there's so many, World War II is just, it's the third rail, like nothing else. Really, World War II and the civil rights movement, I think, are the third rails of American politics that if you have any type of view that is not the approved authorized view of how these events went, you're in a lot of trouble. If you wanted to compare Hitler to Stalin's body count at that time, Stalin was already a genocidal maniac, and Hitler had not gone genocidal yet. So there is a weird dynamic there. Now, in hindsight, it looks a little bit better because you go, yeah, yeah, but he went so genocidal at the end there, you know? But that's a weird.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of a flip side of a different point. And like the other point is like, oh, well, why aren't they using their army or their air force or their navy? Oh, right, because they don't have any of those. Oh, that's right. So you're fighting a war against a people that don't have a government because you've denied them their right to have one. And so that's the thing where I do think if you've occupied the place since 1967, you almost now take on an obligation that you kind of have to almost conduct this as a police matter. You know, you're not allowed to just because otherwise, because now we are getting awfully close to the scenario that we just laid out. We're like, oh, there's a school shooter. Blow up the school.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he used all these people as human shields. We would never, for a goddamn second, if those were our kids in there, we'd never accept that excuse. Be like, what? Yeah, that guy was bad. You still had an obligation to do something else. That was never accepted. Now, that we may look at things differently in the context of a war, but also, by the way, I'm not sure I completely do. Typically speaking, when people think of wars, they're thinking of this government versus this government, this military versus this military. That's not the situation here. You know, so like while Israel is saying, hey, they're using human shields, it's also like, and that is true, I think, to some degree. I think the Israelis overplay it a little bit, but there have been, I think, clear instances where Hamas is using human shields.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like part of the reasons why people have different attitudes about the way two nations fight, like what we think of as war versus what we think as, say, like a policing issue. Like we would never accept the idea that the logic that's used in wars, used in World War II, even used in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially used in the war in Gaza, you know, if there was a bad guy, even a guy who had done something like October 7th, which we have school shooters and things like that here, if there was an active duty school shooter and he's in a school shooting people and we know he's already killed like 25 people blow up the school he's hey he's using him as human shields no it's not our fault you see listen those deaths those deaths while tragic were the school shooter's fault”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's wrong to rape somebody in New Jersey, it's also wrong to rape somebody in Central Africa. And so I'm just saying you're committing the same act that we would consider murder in the first degree here. And then just to go one step further, I think particularly...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But by the way, I don't disagree with the first part of your statement there. I just don't think it's in conflict with what I'm stating. It's like, look, I understand, first of all, that there is a difference between the way you're going to say prosecute crime domestically within your own country and the way you can prosecute crime or a war between two different countries, right? Like maybe it's not exactly the same. You don't have cops that you can just send in. You can't arrest somebody and put them on trial. It's not the same. So like, fine, you could say, but the point I'm making is more like, I'm just saying how we would think about these things in a domestic setting. We're talking about like morality here. And morality by its very nature is something that rises above, you know, the, it rises above logistics. It rises above like nationalities or governments or borders or any of those things. What's right or wrong?”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm saying it might be. It might be genuine by some people. I'm not saying it's necessarily not. I'm saying that. There's a lot of people who are saying the opposite, it doesn't seem like it's consistently genuine from the entire Israeli leadership class, and that even if it is genuine when some people say it, that's kind of not enough to get away from the fact that it's, you know, when Tucker was on Pierce Morgan, he said the thing, he goes, you know, I don't like my tax dollars being used to intentionally kill children. And a lot of people really objected to that word intentionally because I think so many of the defenders of Israel fall behind this like, no, no, no, that's not intentional. We're just trying to kill Hamas. But again, like I said, we would never accept that standard in like a domestic murder case. It's like, no, like the thing is that if you know there are kids there and you know they're going to die, then that's intense.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at South Africa's case that they promoted at the International Court of Justice, the whole thing is just quotes from Israeli leaders. And I'm just saying, like, by the way, it's not like they're always saying, oh, it sure is a shame that we had to kill that eight-year-old girl. They like half the time they say that when they're talking to the international community. And then the other half the time, they seem to basically be saying there's no such thing as an innocent eight-year-old girl. And so I just, I guess, don't find that argument to be very compelling, especially when the thing has been going on for so long”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time it kills innocent civilians, and then there's a wedding, and you order a drone bomb strike on a wedding. Like, no, you murdered those people. That's murder in the first degree. Like, I just don't. And so, yes, like, you know, like whether you say out loud, oh, it sure is a shame that we got to kill all these kids. When you're doing it over and over and you know the action you're taking is going to kill more kids. I just don't think like it's yeah, it's a little bit different, but really not that much. It's still pretty much and then also when you mix in with that the fact that like”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I would be charged with is murder in the first degree. And the fact that I went in there and said, like, well, listen, hold on. It's a shame that I had to kill those babies. I really just wanted to kill that one guy. I wish the babies weren't there. And they'd be like, yeah, but you knew they were there. And you did it anyway. You get murder in the first degree. Maybe it would make some little difference tinkering around with the sentencing at the end of it, but it doesn't like in-kind change what the crime is there. And so I just think at a certain point, when you're doing something, like, you know, look, I'll say maybe with a little bit of an edge, you know, let's say Barack Obama wants to drone bomb, you know, this place to kill a terrorist and he thinks he can do it without killing any innocent civilians, does it, and then it ends up killing some innocent civilians. That's one thing. But once you've done it over and over and over again and every single...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a little, I mean, okay, I don't. I don't 100% disagree with you, but I think if I would say the degree to which that matters, you know, like at a murder trial after somebody's been convicted and before sentencing sometimes the judge will allow them to give a statement. And like if their statement is like, I'm very sorry for what I did and I'm so sorry to the family and this or that or that, like that might be like life without parole rather than the death penalty. You know what I mean? Like it might make that bit of difference in that. And if you get up there and you're like, hey, I'm happy for what I did, screw the family, blah, that, that might make a judge who was going to give you life with that parole, give you the death penalty or something like it's like that type of margin around the edge. Let's say you're a really bad guy and I want to kill you and you're at home with a bunch of women and children. And I know there's women and children there. Like I know for a fact that if I blow up this building, it's going to kill all those.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More primitive barbaric way, I guess you could say. You know, there's something a little bit cleaner about like, you know, when it's done by a government and its collateral damage and it was done with sophisticated weaponry, okay, still innocent people on the end of those bombs.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Language for Hamas. It's like, all right, you know, it's a little bit difficult to accuse another group of being a death cult when the group you're supporting has killed so many more people than them. Now, I'm not saying that's the only metric. Like there's other things that are factors too, but the fact is that you have, I mean, I don't know to look over the numbers for the whole history of the conflict, but the amount killed by the Israelis on the Palestinian side versus the amount killed by the Palestinians is 20 to 1 in Israel's, you know, killing more people, maybe more than that. I don't exact, you know, I'd have to look at the numbers. But Israel's killed far, far, more Palestinians than Palestinians have ever killed Israelis. And so it just rings a little hollow to me to just call them a death cult. We're the democracy, even though none of there's millions of people who can't vote over who rules them. But they're the death cult. I mean, look, they kill people in a...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I'm not even saying this to try to be inflammatory or try to pick on the Israelis. There's things about Israeli society I like. I don't hate the people there. I'm Jewish. I love Jewish people. It's not. But the fact is that that's not a democracy. That's an apartheid state. And that's just, I'm not even trying to be inflammatory when I say this. It's just literally describing what's in front of you. If we in America right now said black people no longer get to vote and black people can only live in these few neighborhoods, we don't get to call ourselves a democracy anymore then. You know, and like I'm not even coming at this from a pro-democracy point of view. I'm just saying like if your defense of them is like, well, we're a democracy, which seems to be the case so much, well, no, you're really not. You're really not as long as you got millions of people who have no say in their own government. Then you're really not a democracy. And so, again, so you could frame it as democracy versus death cult was his.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't even really call it an occupation anymore. It's an annexation. You know, you took these lands. You have control that you are what the definition of the government is. And you could call Hamas the government all you want to, but they're not the sovereigns. They're not the final decision makers. Israel's the final decision maker. Hamas does not meaningfully in any way decide the biggest questions about Gaza. I'm talking before this war, not even, you know, pre-October 7th. And so the problem Israel has in order to call themselves a democracy is that there's somewhere between 5 and 6 million people, less now because they've killed a lot of them. But there's somewhere between five and six million people who live under Israeli control, who do not have voting rights. And I just, by any other reasonable, commonly held standard of democracy, we would not call that a democracy. I mean, like, I'm not.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Because look, when you've occupied an area since 1967,”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Okay. So when it actually happened in effect, it involved a massive amount, somewhere between 700 and 800,000 Arabs being forcedfully 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? 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 their Democratically. You got there through force. But forget that. I'll let that one go and just.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Israel, it was much less than 50 50, but even in 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...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think 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 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. You know what I mean? But the point is, the Zionist settlers, and 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...”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All I had to get out. But I get to say that what I want the rest of the podcast, but they're just that I had to. No, 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 silence speech that people in camps and things like that, the surveillance, that stuff.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, first of all, I would just say that, and I'm not saying this as a fan of democracy, I'm not like a big believer in democracy. I believe in liberty, and I think democracy is often Not in line with Leberty.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I'm more hopeful than not that you could get to a place where like, but it requires like you have to, like, if you do understand the Ron Paul point about blowback, the General McCrystal point about insurgent math, that you just realize that it's like, you're... 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 cure is making the patient more sick. So stop doing that. And then let's see if maybe we could heal.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your sons are healthy and live good lives, or would you rather they suffer but be loyal obedience to the state? And they were like, we would rather they be obedient to the state and blah, blah, blah, and all these things. And Murray Rothbard was saying he saw this interview and he was talking to his friend. He was like, oh my God, this is horrible. Like it's hopeless. These people's minds have been warped. And then he was talking to his friend who's like a China expert who had been there a lot. And he was like, no, they're not. That's what they say when the cameras are around. As soon as the cameras go like, so anyway, I'm just making the point there that there is, look, even in the situation with Israel and Gaza, specifically Gaza, not even the West Bank, when you could look at it, when the peace talks were going on, support for Hamas plummeted, when the peace talks fell apart, support for Hamas went way back up. You know, every time there's an aggressive military campaign, support for Hamas goes back up. So I just think.”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd say I get your point. It's an interesting question that I don't know if any of us know exactly the answer to, but I would say that, you know, Even after, what was it, 80 years of the Soviet Union, you know, it's like, and there were real debates back then about the new communist man and whether the mines had been so warped of people that they would never even want, they would never even care about these things like liberty or national identity or independence. And then yet at the end, it was all still there. It was very repressed and it went underground and people weren't allowed to talk about it, but they all still had it. And in fact, I was just listening the other day to this Murray Rothbard speech from the early 90s, and he was talking about how there was something where there was like a camera crew interviewed like a Chinese family under Real Deal Chinese communism, I believe it was before Mao Zi Tung died, and they were like, they were just saying all these crazy shit to the camera. They were like, would you rather?”
2025-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source