Ten Minus Two Equals Twenty

Dave Smith tells Lex Fridman he sits with the Rothbard school of anarcho-capitalism, a notch past even Ron Paul's leftover sliver of government. Among the broader libertarian family he lists Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell as the mainstream names, then a Ron Paul camp that put far more weight on foreign policy, then Murray Rothbard and a separate anarcho-capitalist line from David Friedman. The 42-year-old comedian and host of Part of the Problem is not hedging. "A big fan is an understatement," he says of Paul. He reveres him on the level of Jefferson and Washington.

The reasons are personal as much as doctrinal. Paul spent decades as the lone no vote in a bipartisan Congress, which is how a former obstetrician who delivered thousands of babies earned the nickname Dr. No. Smith says he is the only member of Congress in his lifetime that lobbyists simply stopped visiting, because the first pitch was met with "The Constitution doesn't authorize us to do that." He has met Paul many times: Air Force veteran, athlete, married more than sixty years, "from an older, better generation," sweet without being a pushover. Smith does not want to slide into hero worship. He still thinks great men ought to be revered.

Paul's through-line, as Smith tells it, is that liberty is the highest political value and government is an instrument of force, so more government means less liberty. The Federal Reserve, spending, and the war industry are faces of the same problem. Paul was talking about draining the swamp long before it was a mass slogan, and his 2008 and 2012 campaigns laid ground for Donald Trump to look at Jeb Bush in a South Carolina primary debate and say, "Your brother lied us into war," with Republicans cheering — many of them people who had voted twice for George W. Bush and mocked liberals for opposing Iraq.

For Smith, who first found Paul in 2007 at twenty-three, the real shock was consistency. In his naive map, liberals wanted big government at home and were skeptical of wars; conservatives talked limited government at home and backed every new war. Paul was the first figure of his generation to say he wanted limited government in both places. Once that door opened, the old pairing looked absurd: a constitutionally limited world empire. Woodrow Wilson and FDR, he notes, at least had a cohesive program — big government at home and abroad. Opposing that package is the Ron Paul worldview.

Smith was eighteen and living in New York on September 11, 2001. He already thought the Iraq War was a lie, but the official story — they hate us for our freedom — never clicked. He still loves Pat Buchanan's jab that Dick Cheney made Osama bin Laden sound as if he had stumbled onto a copy of the Bill of Rights in the Afghan desert, flipped to speedy trial, and decided to suicide-bomb. Ron Paul's version was the first that made sense of the whole terror-war era: if the United States kills people around the world, props up dictatorships, and plants bases in Muslim holy land, hatred is not a puzzle. It is a cost of the policy.

He is not a cultural relativist. Some cultures, he says, are better than others. What unites people is the tribal impulse after your people are killed. A cable-news Democrat once asked him, after a minor ISIS-inspired attack in New York, whether he really wanted America to "do nothing." Under the suit, Smith heard: you are telling us not to go kill some people. That is the same impulse as invading after 9/11, and he thinks it is the main motor on both sides of Israel-Palestine and the War on Terror. Dark as it is, there is something almost clarifying in seeing everyone caught in the same cycle.

The formula he keeps returning to did not come from a libertarian. General Stanley McChrystal, running the Afghanistan war, coined insurgent math: 10 minus 2 equals 20. Smith reread it after Trump's strikes on the Houthis. From 2009 through 2015, the Obama administration's "targeted" drone campaign in Yemen — 96 percent of the dead innocent, by Smith's telling — was aimed at al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. AQAP grew. Each strike took out a target and three little girls; the girls had brothers, uncles, and fathers, and those men signed up. You are fighting in a way that produces more of the thing you are fighting.

Fridman adds a third party to the two-tribe story: the military-industrial complex that profits from escalation. Smith describes an apparatus of intelligence agencies, weapons makers, and media that does not merely cash in on conflict but helps create the public appetite for it. In 1990, he says, no soccer mom was demanding war over Saddam Hussein's slant-drilling dispute with Kuwait. Top-down storytelling turned Iraq into the next Hitler. Neoconservative writing in the unipolar 1990s was less guarded; he recalls a line Jonah Goldberg agreed with, that every ten years or so America should find a puny country and put it against the wall to show the world it means business.

Fridman notes that the drums are beating over Taiwan and that he cannot see a just-war case for intervening. Smith wants a prior humility. Americans, he says, still have an empire mentality, as if the question were whether "we" should allow a Chinese move. He hopes Taiwan stays as free as possible and China becomes free, the way he hopes every marriage stays healthy. If a neighbor is cheating, that does not give you jurisdiction over the marriage. The thought experiment he offers is the reverse: if Washington decided to take Mexico City by force and Beijing said it was not sure it could allow that, most Americans would laugh. Allow? How, exactly, with ships off the Mexican coast?

In the war games he has seen, a conventional fight to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is a loss for the United States every time; a nuclear fight ends the world. Fridman objects that TSMC is different — an economic dependency, almost magical. Smith grants the chips matter and still refuses war as the answer. If supply is the fear, the response is something like a Manhattan Project to make the things at home, not a pledge to fight a nuclear peer. Taiwan is not magic. The same logic, he says, already constrains Ukraine policy: nobody in Biden's camp suggested sending the 82nd Airborne, because a direct war with Russia is the end of the world.

He is no defender of the Chinese regime — "fuck them," and he would like the imaginary checks to start arriving. The One China policy, though, has been official United States policy for fifty years. American politicians still talk as if China has no right to go into Taiwan, and Beijing answers that this is not actually the deal. The clearest glitch was Joe Biden saying the United States would militarily intervene, after which the White House corrected its own president and restated One China. Smith reads the correction as the point: telling China that Washington now recognizes Taiwan's independence might be the thing that triggers an invasion. Reality sets limits. The United States is "the biggest bully in the world," so the available move is "we'd sure love if you don't," plus every off-ramp, not "no, fuck you" until the other side does the thing.

Asked whether any military intervention is justified, Smith says yes: a country invaded has a right to fight. Ukrainians may defend their land; the American Revolution was a just war. What you never have, in his theory, is a right to kill innocent people. He allows Saw-movie edge cases — kill one person to save twenty — and still calls the killing evil, only perhaps explainable to a jury. The onus on anyone dropping bombs on cities should be overwhelming: you absolutely had to. Ratios of civilians to combatants in Gaza do not settle it, and "Hamas has to go" is not a starting axiom. Lots of governments "have to go." That does not license killing their people.

October 7, he says without hedging, was horrible, an indefensible act of terrorism. Targeting civilians is always evil. He rejects Osama bin Laden's 1990s claim that American civilians are fair game because they vote — the logic of a fanatic — and then turns it on pro-Israel arguments that a 2005 election Hamas won as a plurality voids Palestinian rights twenty years later. Hostages held for a year and a half break his heart. The massacre is also, for him, an indictment of the occupation and of Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, who sold himself as the tough right-winger who would keep Israel safe by abandoning a two-state path, and then presided over the worst slaughter in the country's history.

It is no longer even an open secret, Smith says, that Netanyahu propped up Hamas. When Qatari money dried up, Mossad was sent to insist it resume — hundreds of millions in briefcases of cash — to keep Gaza and the West Bank divided so neither the world nor liberal Israeli Jews could force a deal. Fridman asks what the alternative was: blocking aid looks cruel too. Smith points at the blockade since 2007. Potatoes and sugar are barred as dual-use; cash to Hamas somehow is not. You cannot run a full siege and then complain about the responsibilities that come with it. The decent path was to let reputable aid groups in, not to squeeze Qatar for cash while turning those groups away.

Control since a one-week war in 1967 is not a temporary occupation while you figure things out. His analogy is kidnapping: you may not lock someone in your basement, but once you do, starving them is a worse crime than holding them. Gazans, he lists, have no vote over the government that rules them, no commerce with the outside world, no free movement, no secure property, no fair trial. Lecturing people in that condition about the form of their resistance is, he thinks, a weak moral perch. Egypt and Israel fought four wars in a few decades, then made a land-for-peace deal in the late 1970s and have not fought since — not because Egypt has no radical Islam, but because the land question was settled. Jefferson's line about slavery, "we have the wolf by the tail," named a real fear. In hindsight the answer was still: you cannot keep slaves.

Fridman asks Smith to steel-man Douglas Murray's book On Democracies and Death Cults, which treats Hamas as an evil that must be eliminated before anything else can be built. Smith grants almost the whole brief. Hamas is a fanatical death cult; it has devastated its own people; it spends resources antagonizing Israel into overreaction in order to turn world opinion, and it has been effective. Crowds in Gaza celebrating after October 7 are, he says, sickening. He puts those celebrations next to Nikki Haley signing bombs and "mission accomplished" banners. America had one 9/11 and lost its mind. People in a strip he is willing to call a concentration camp, five miles by twenty-five, with no airport or seaport, have lived through a thousand 9/11s. He finds it hard to sit in judgment of minds formed there.

The death-cult versus democracy frame still fails, he argues, because Israel is not a democracy in the sense Murray needs. Citing Benny Morris, he says the Zionist project always knew it would involve transfer; in 1948 that meant some 700,000 to 800,000 Arabs forcibly evicted, producing an 80-20 split. He would even let that origin story go if the state had then run as a regular democracy. The occupation that began in 1967 is, after this long, annexation. Hamas is not the sovereign; Israel is the final decision-maker. Five to six million people live under Israeli control without voting rights. If the United States announced that Black people could not vote and could live only in a few neighborhoods, it would not get to call itself a democracy. He says he is Jewish, does not hate Israelis, and is describing what is in front of him: an apartheid state.

Fridman presses a moral distinction: one side says it tries not to kill the eight-year-old girl; the other says it loves death more than life. Smith does not wholly disagree. He compares it to a convicted murderer's statement before sentencing — apology might mean life without parole instead of death — a margin around the edge, not a change in the crime. If you know a building holds women and children and you blow it up anyway, that is murder in the first degree, even if you add that you wish the babies were not there. After enough drone strikes on weddings, "collateral damage" is a slogan. South Africa's International Court of Justice filing, he notes, is built from quotes by Israeli leaders, half of whom talk as if there is no such thing as an innocent eight-year-old. Over the conflict's history he puts the kill ratio at roughly twenty to one, Israelis killing far more Palestinians than the reverse. Calling the weaker party a death cult then rings hollow.

The analogy he wants every listener to try at home is the school shooter. If a gunman has already killed people inside a school, you do not blow up the school and blame the children for being used as human shields. You would never accept that if they were your kids. Hamas does use human shields to some degree, he thinks Israel overplays it, and the flip side of "why don't they use their army and air force" is that they do not have those things because Israel has denied them a government. Occupy a place since 1967 and you take on something closer to a police obligation. Support for Hamas, he adds, is not welded shut: it fell during peace talks, rose when talks collapsed, and rose again after Israeli military campaigns. The first step is to stop a cure that makes the patient sicker.

Fridman says all war is immoral and that even World War II is hard to score as just once Stalin is in the picture. Smith agrees it is the third rail of American politics, alongside the civil rights movement: stray from the authorized story and you are in trouble. Allying with Stalin when he had already done many of the worst things he would ever do was a strange choice at the time, whatever hindsight does with Hitler's later genocide. He jokes his way through Mao — Fridman says the Chinese Communist Party rates Mao 70 percent correct — and then turns to his friend Darryl Cooper, host of Martyr Made, who was branded a Nazi sympathizer after a Tucker Carlson interview.

Smith came to Cooper through Scott Horton, who called Martyr Made the best history podcast going. The first series he heard, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, struck him as painstaking. He cannot understand how anyone who listens to that work walks away thinking Cooper is a Jew-hater. What Cooper said on Tucker, with a hyperbolic rib at his Anglo-Saxon friend Jocko Willink, was that he sometimes calls Winston Churchill the chief villain of World War II — not the worst person, not the one who committed the most atrocities, but a man hell-bent on turning a possible invasion of Poland into the cascade that followed. Fridman thinks that claim, trolling stripped out, is dead wrong, and that the German-Soviet war was coming regardless. Smith calls that a fair debate and trusts Cooper's forthcoming World War II series not to excuse Nazi atrocities.

The weaponized lesson of World War II, Smith argues, has been that appeasement is always wrong and civilian slaughter can be licensed because it was necessary once. Every Israel-Palestine debate he has done invokes Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Bobby Kennedy compared Hamas to the Nazis; Smith says Hamas does not even meaningfully control Gaza, while the Nazis held most of Europe. Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Trump, Hamas — each in turn is Hitler, and none is close. The United States is still the only country that has used nuclear weapons. If Jew-hatred is the worry, he wants the same honesty he wants about 9/11: even if some people would hate Jews anyway, the brutal campaign in Gaza, fought with American weapons and money, is the recruiting pitch. Wesley Clark said an Israeli-paid study sketched toppling seven countries in five years. Mean posts on X, he adds, are a real and ugly rise, especially among young white men formed by years of official racialism — and Jews in America are about 2 percent of the population and thriving. Treating Twitter nastiness as if it were Nazi Germany is hysteria, and actual antisemites in the replies of Israel critics are, in his view, doing Mossad's work.

Fridman admits he is leaning against a second, three-hour interview with Netanyahu, even though an earlier one-hour session is among his regrets. The hesitation is the chorus: Jew-haters and pro-Israel enforcers alike, the "chanting sheep," who follow him around and make him feel dumber, the way Joe Rogan feels after a bad comedian. Smith does not pretend the cost is imaginary. Humans are not evolved to know that thousands of strangers currently want them dead. He has still decided that the price of a family, a career, and crowds who love the work is some people talking trash online. He and Fridman, he says, already chose the arena. How do you turn down three hours with Netanyahu? Something interesting will be revealed even if you do not grill him.

Long-form audio is not just more minutes. Cable news — red-and-blue backdrop, ticker at the bottom — is a different animal from falling into conversation, as Trump and JD Vance found when they did podcasts. Fridman pushes back: interviewing a world leader is a distinct skill. You cannot mouth off the way two podcasters can. You have to humanize the guest enough for the mind to unclench, and Netanyahu has spent a career building walls under fire at home and abroad. Smith agrees it is a calculation, not a moral exam. Then he adds a check he applies to himself: if the real reason you do not want the conversation is that it would be a lot of work, or that you are scared, those are usually not good reasons.

Smith feels obligated to do several debates a year precisely because he sits for long, friendly interviews on big shows. If he is going to lay out a worldview on Fridman, Rogan, Tucker, and Patrick Bet-David, he thinks he owes the public a night against someone saying no. He has young kids; a public demolition would follow him. That risk is also the point. If there is a hole in the argument he cannot answer, he kind of deserves to be humiliated. Fridman does not want to live forever. Smith agrees scarcity is part of what makes a life precious, and that societies get new ideas in part because people die. Then Fridman steers them to Jeffrey Epstein.

Fridman has been attacked for old talks with Tim Dillon in which he doubted a Mossad link to Epstein; he has since moved, and now thinks some intelligence service is plausible. Smith says he never claimed "definitely Mossad" — one jokey post — and that we will probably never know every detail of any intelligence operation. He shares the hunger for an ending, with JFK files out and more Epstein files promised. The piece that is hard to walk around is Alex Acosta, the prosecutor who said the intelligence community told him Epstein was intelligence and to go easy. Smith thinks he may have worked with elements of more than one service, perhaps even rogue ones. The career itself, he says, is otherwise unexplainable: a teacher at Dalton, an elite New York private school, then Bear Stearns, partner in two years, hundreds of millions of dollars, no one sure where the money came from, then insertion among the highest political and cultural names.

The horror does not depend on the logo on the file. A pedophile ring touching the most powerful people in the United States and, to some degree, the world — the British royal family, the Clintons — was known, covered up, and allowed to continue. A blackmail operation that ran on raping American children is equally monstrous whether the handler was CIA or Mossad. Acosta did not resign. An ABC reporter said on a hot mic that she had the whole story and that the network killed it over the royals; she stayed. Epstein died in a high-security prison with cameras down and logs unfilled. Tucker Carlson's question is Smith's: where are the tapes? Everyone talks flight logs. The man was taping people. Pam Bondi's line that only national-security material will be redacted makes him incredulous. Why would a pedophile ring be a national-security secret?

That is his answer to Sam Harris, who has scolded him and Joe Rogan for tearing down institutions and argued that trust in those institutions is necessary. Fine, Smith says: where are the institutions I am supposed to trust? If you actually care about that trust, you should be louder than the comedians about telling the truth here. Fridman does believe well-run institutions have value. "Who's the utopian now?" Smith asks. People who treat Fridman's rise, or Smith's, as proof of intelligence affiliation are, both men think, mostly lazy: confirmation bias plus a sexier story than a decade of gradual work. Comedians, Smith adds, sometimes say the obvious thing everyone else is resisting. Given enough time, Tim Dillon is always right.

Smith thinks Israel is losing the internet badly, with a generational break that will not reverse as the over-forty cohort ages out. He also thinks treating enemies as possessed monsters is how you talk yourself out of diplomacy. The Houthis, he notes, held on through eight years of a Saudi war backed by the United States; a few Tomahawks from Trump were not going to finish what that did not. They reportedly did not attack shipping during a ceasefire and resumed when it broke. Sometimes there is a diplomatic solution and not a military one. "You can't do diplomacy with monsters. You can't make a deal. You can't negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans."

On Ukraine, what Trump is pursuing is "infinitely preferable" to Biden's course. Smith disliked the mineral deal as bullying Kyiv out of resources and, worse, as a back-door security guarantee: if we are in business, an attack on you is an attack on us. That is the entangling alliance George Washington warned against. Average Americans will not send their children over whether Luhansk is ruled by Kyiv or Moscow. He thinks Trump wants peace and that Putin has been willing to deal, including a late-2021 draft treaty NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has described: put in writing that Ukraine will not join NATO, and there would be no invasion. Stoltenberg bragged about saying no, then bragged about Finland joining. Smith hears an admission that a promise could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, on terms better than Ukraine will finally get.

William Burns, later Biden's CIA director, wrote as ambassador the memo "Nyet Means Nyet," dumped by WikiLeaks, telling Condoleezza Rice that pushing Ukraine into NATO could mean civil war or worse, and a decision to intervene "Russia does not want to have to make." George Kennan told Thomas Friedman in 1998 that NATO expansion after the Soviet collapse was the worst possible move, and that when Russia eventually reacted the expanders would say "see, we were right," getting the causation backward. Fridman insists on the foundation: Putin invaded on February 24, 2022, and the person who pulls the trigger first and keeps pulling it is at fault. Smith agrees, same standard as Gaza. Scott Horton's book has a chapter of options Putin had. Spitting in a man's face at a bar does not justify shooting him. It does explain why the shooting happened. That, Smith says, is his contention about this war.

Washington would not allow China or Russia to overthrow Mexico's government, pump in arms, and float a military alliance; no great power would, back to Jefferson. Zelenskyy has moved from reclaiming all territory toward some future security guarantee, which Smith reads as asking Americans to promise a war they will not fight. Trump has stacked political capital on ending the fighting and will look very bad if he cannot, so he is highly incentivized to move fast. The part Smith hates most is deaths after a war is already decided: bombing Afghanistan on the way out, when nobody was even pretending the project was still a democracy-building mission. Neighboring peoples who starved, were invaded, and watched their state collapse twice in a century live with a sense of survival Americans have not had to feel since 1812.

What Smith learned from years of Part of the Problem is that a podcast is a relationship. He had met Fridman only once, on a chaotic night at The Vulture while Rogan was on the phone with Dana White in the cancel-culture storm, and still felt he already knew him. Listeners come up the same way. You cannot lie to them any more than you can lie to people in your life; the shortcuts are always on offer, and not taking them pays. Fridman, a heavy podcast listener himself, puts the friendship threshold somewhere between twenty and fifty hours. Smith lands on forty to fifty of unguarded speech. After that you see into a soul, and if the person will not let you, you notice that too. That, he thinks, is why Kamala Harris was probably right not to do Rogan: she spent every interview not letting anyone see her, and three hours would have made the wall obvious.

On Joe Rogan he will not be understated. Ron Paul and Rogan are "my generals." He was an old-school fan before the podcast, hanging around joerogan.net, watching the Carlos Mencia confrontation on Rogan's site, and guessing the show would be big because Rogan had so much to say. The first booking, around 2016, came when Smith had maybe 5,000 followers; Rogan had heard him on Ari Shaffir's show and wanted to talk. He opened for Rogan, worked his club, took his advice — and regrets the times he did not. Rogan, with more going on than anyone, still took the call. Fridman calls the quality fearlessness, not just money. During Covid, Rogan had Dr. McCullough, Dr. Malone, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on, and later let Smith talk Ukraine and Israel when the penalty for leaving the line was enormous. When CNN and Fox agreed, that used to be the line. The biggest show in the country now lets people challenge the regime. Smith thinks that has been historic.

Fridman worries that professional conspiracy casters question everything so hard they never get closer to the truth, and that dogmatic certainty is a drug that sounds like intelligence. Smith agrees the failure mode is speaking with certainty you do not have, and working backward from a conclusion. His exhibit is a Project for a New American Century document from the 1990s in which neoconservatives — Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others — sketched Middle East wars and NATO expansion, then wrote that popular support would be hard to muster "short of another Pearl Harbor style event." Nine-eleven truthers treated the line as a confession. Smith says it proves they knew they needed a shock, and that after the attacks they said they had one. It is evidence-y. It does not show they were in on the plot.

The same sloppiness, he says, now feeds the claim that Israel did 9/11. Larry Silverstein took out a large insurance policy on the World Trade Center — how did he know? Smith answers: how did he know the number one terrorist target on earth might need a large policy, after the same target was bombed in 1993? He will speculate now and then. He prefers cases he thinks he can prove, such as the neocon agenda to invade Iraq a decade before weapons of mass destruction became the public brief. When a data point gives you that little pleasure of confirming what you wanted, he tries to be ten times as skeptical, because gravity will suck in bad points along with good ones. Certainty is almost a prerequisite of leadership, and a lot of the time the certain person is just wrong.

Zoom out, and the pattern he hates is that nobody loses a job. Ghislaine Maxwell went to prison; he cannot name an FBI resignation for missing Epstein. The people who sold Iraq were not even kicked out of polite society. They lied the country into war after war, near-destroyed the dollar, locked it down on what he calls pseudoscience, lied about the vaccine while mandating it, and faced no consequences. A business or a marriage cannot fail that hard with no repercussions and expect to survive. One healthy shift from the last election, both men think, is that the commander in chief now has to sit for long interviews instead of ninety-second debate answers. You cannot run a Kamala Harris if she cannot do that. The Democratic Party is a mess, which Smith reads as an opening for someone to Trump it from outside the three-letter agencies — not, in his view, AOC, though he would not have picked Trump in 2014 either. Authenticity is the scarce resource. Jon Stewart, with whom he disagrees often, at least seems to believe what he is saying.

What gives Smith hope is an argument he credits to economist Gene Epstein — no relation — that he calls Gene's case for radical optimism. Sit in 1845, at the height of slavery, and tell someone that in twenty years chattel slavery will be abolished across the West. They would call you mad; it had been the human default. America fought a civil war to get there; many other countries simply walked away. Or sit in 1981, with neocons attacking Reagan's detente as a guarantee of another hundred years of Soviet rule, and say that in ten years there will be no Soviet Union. That sounded insane too. It was true.

Three years before this conversation, during Covid, Smith thought the regime was going to shut the alternative ecosystem down. People he knew were taking strikes for talking about vaccine injury; Twitter bans came in waves; the grasp looked tighter every month. He was wrong. He never imagined Elon Musk assembling $44 billion to buy Twitter. The monopoly on propaganda broke. In 2002, he remembers a year-long campaign — weapons of mass destruction, a 9/11 link, al-Qaeda as friends, a nuke for Kansas — that the New York Times, Bill O'Reilly, CNN, and the Washington Post all sold. You could not run that play now. You cannot make Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson go along, and they would almost certainly book the people tearing the story apart. That is why he also rejects collective guilt from polls: he remembers a country where every right-winger was sure Iraq had to be invaded, and dissent was treated as weakness. Public opinion can be manufactured, whether the claim is that Jews support Israel or that 70 percent of Gazans support Hamas.

Fridman's own hope is simpler and more physical: SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets, not the ones over Gaza. Covid felt like proof that civilization could not handle a pandemic-lite, let alone what comes next; watching humans leave the planet tells him we are inventive enough to make it. Smith's private inoculation against nostalgia is medical. His son had a congenital heart defect and open-heart surgery at three days old. Twenty years earlier the child would have died. He is fine. That fact, Smith says, makes him unwilling to wish himself into any earlier era, whatever else is broken. There are miracles running all over the place that no previous generation had. Fridman closes with Ron Paul: "Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it's wrong."