Matt Kibbe is the President of Free the People, an organization that seeks to promote libertarian ideals. He is the author of three books: Give Us Liberty, a Tea Party Manifesto with Dick Armey, Hostile Takeover, and the book that I ve been reading the past couple of weeks, Don t Hurt People and Don t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.
00:00:00.760Hi everybody, this is Gadsar for the Sad Truth. As usual, I have another fantastic guest for you today.
00:00:07.400I've got Matt Kibbe. I thought it was Kibbe. It's spelled K-I-B-B-E. Kibbe is a very famous Arabic dish, but Matt assured me that he's not Lebanese or Arabic.
00:00:18.820Matt used to be the president of Free the People, an organization that seeks to promote, or is currently the president of Free the People, an organization that seeks to promote libertarian ideals.
00:00:28.460He used to previously be the president of FreedomWorks. He is the author of three books, Give Us Liberty, a Tea Party Manifesto with Dick Armey, Hostile Takeover, Resisting, Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America, and the book that I delved into the past couple of weeks and only finished a few days ago, Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff, a Libertarian Manifesto.
00:00:53.420And I was particularly keen to speak to Matt because I live in the greatest of parasitic states. Welcome, Matt. How are you doing?
00:01:03.180Oh, it's such a pleasure to have you. You reminded me that we met at, I think, the Global Liberty Institute Gala prior to the following day's event. Was it at the Glenn Lowry Awards? Was that it?
00:01:20.560Yeah, right. Well, it's so good to see you. So, okay, let's jump into it. I guess the first question that many people would want to know, define for us some of the key tenets of what it is to be a libertarian.
00:01:34.460Yeah, like you can get a ten-hour answer from most libertarians on this, but I like to say you should be free to live your life as long as you don't hurt people or take their stuff.
00:01:47.100And it's based on a philosophy of individualism. Individuals are the objective building block of any civil society.
00:01:56.180And we just think that beautiful things happen when people are left free to innovate and cooperate and work hard and do all of the amazing things that we celebrate.
00:02:09.360All of that was because some individual had an idea and found partnership with other people and did something greater than they could have done by themselves.
00:02:18.840And that process, that process of figuring stuff out is only possible when people are free.
00:02:25.720So, I like to say that most people, except for psychopaths, have a little bit of libertarian in them because this is how we live our daily lives.
00:02:34.520So, okay, the ideal of libertarianism can be applied. I mean, freedom is an all-encompassing term. Of course, it could apply to economic freedom.
00:02:43.120It could apply to political freedom, to freedom of speech, to being free from intervening in foreign lands and therefore you become an isolationist.
00:02:53.120What does the term freedom encompass when you're talking about libertarian ideals?
00:02:59.040So, there's sort of two sides of the same coin. And I think part of it, and I certainly quote her in my book, and I was very inspired as a young man reading Ayn Rand, her half of the libertarian coin is all about my right as an individual to control and define and live my own life.
00:03:20.680And she, of course, was a refugee of the Bolshevik revolution, a young Jewish girl that fled to the United States, gave up everything in order to do that.
00:03:30.640So, hers was that primal scream that you don't own me, I own myself, and I'm going to make my own choices.
00:03:37.320The other half of that, which I don't think is in any way unrelated, is the part where free people choose voluntarily to cooperate.
00:03:49.300And through cooperation, you can achieve some of these really profound values that I think make the human experience interesting.
00:03:57.420Ideas like respect. Ideas like trust. Ideas ultimately like love.
00:04:04.100These are like the highest achievements that an individual can find.
00:04:08.840And that's only done in cooperation with other people.
00:04:13.820And I think some libertarians are guilty of de-emphasizing that community that comes when people are free to live their own lives.
00:04:24.600Because we are social creatures, even libertarians.
00:04:28.860Maybe there's a few who aren't, but we're social creatures as well.
00:04:34.100And the really beautiful things that happen when people are free are something that's greater than anything we could accomplish on our own.
00:04:44.340And that in no way undermines the principles of individualism.
00:04:47.920It's just the logic of that extended to how we organize as communities and as societies.
00:04:54.480Very interesting. I just want to tell a tangential side story about Ayn Rand.
00:05:00.360And then I'll come back to sort of more substantive media issues.
00:05:03.960I was actually, I think it was the trip where we met at the Global Liberty Institute.
00:06:06.420He goes, well, why don't you go buy them for me?
00:06:08.500And of course, I'll pay you back, which kind of make me chuckle because what he suggested could only come from the mouth of a billionaire who thinks that as we're walking to the beach,
00:06:20.820I just happen to have maybe $50,000 or $60,000 laying around that I can pay it for him.
00:06:25.920So anyways, I don't know if you would know who that oil tycoon is.
00:06:28.880I'm not going to mention him, but a huge fan.
00:06:30.700I'm not sure if he ended up buying those copies, but if you are interested, there are first editions in Palm Beach ready for the taking.
00:06:39.760I have a suspicion who that is and I should point out, and this makes me an extremely weird person.
00:06:46.780One of the most romantic books my wife ever got me was not a first edition signed copy of Atlas Shrugged, but it was signed by Ayn Rand.
00:06:55.200And it meant a lot to me, again, because Anthem was the first book I read as a 13-year-old that sort of turned me on to this entire philosophical exploration.
00:07:08.560Yeah, so I want to talk about your trajectory, which you just kind of hinted at when you were 13 and first were exposed to Rand's work.
00:07:14.780So some of the other people that, you know, I was already familiar with, but in reading your book, it kind of, I got re-energized and sort of saying, oh, I got to dig deep into these guys.
00:07:25.880Of course, there's one, is it, do you say Mises or Mises?
00:07:30.060Mises, which I, by the way, I cite him in The Parasitic Mind in a different context.
00:07:35.100And then you've got Hayek, and then you've got more recently Rothbard.
00:07:41.680So these are some of the main guys that we might think of when we're thinking about, you know, libertarian philosophies.
00:07:46.640Are there any other folks that if we're trying to create kind of a genealogy of that thought, who might other people be that we might be missing here?
00:07:55.280If you dig into the footnotes of Hayek and Mises, you're going to find some continental philosophers who are fairly obscure, but absolutely the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, particularly Adam Smith, but the whole host of guys that were writing in that milieu that Adam Smith was writing in.
00:08:15.120And this book, by the way, is my very serious attempt to translate the entirety of the theory of moral sentiments into a tweet.
00:08:24.820And this is back when tweets were short.
00:08:26.540So it was a heroic effort, but I think I mostly captured it.
00:18:57.940So Vernon Smith, who's a Nobel laureate, had been whisked away to join Chapman and they
00:19:04.620had a really nice group and I had been invited and the chancellor who who had been poached from
00:19:10.860George Mason and the president had been very, very keen on me joining Chapman.
00:19:17.940And the whole setup had been, you know, all the T's were crossed and all the I's were dotted.
00:19:23.500But then precisely for petty academic reasons, it fell through, although I was officially told that it was due to budgetary reasons.
00:19:34.480It had nothing to do with budgetary reasons.
00:19:36.200And that has always been a very sour point because I thought I thought that, you know, we had finally made it to the to the promised land, meaning Southern California.
00:19:43.780And at the last minute, it has been whisked away.
00:19:46.200So you're you're exactly right that you're disdain for the political backstabbing in academia is certainly not pretty.
00:19:54.740Do you want to add anything to that or should I move on to the next question?
00:19:57.660Just very quickly, I'm remembering one of the I won't name names, but one of the places I was considering was in London to finish my Ph.D.
00:20:06.860And this is back when I'm still a tea party guy and cancel culture was was a big thing there that I hadn't at least wasn't on my radar screen yet.
00:20:17.360And I thought, like, if anything, it might be a little bit prestigious to have this guy who writes these bestselling books be part of your program.
00:20:25.360And he was scared. He thought that it would draw undue attention to his department.
00:20:31.060So that that obviously never materialized.
00:20:34.160Well, I tell you, I often call academics a new species that is an invertebrate castrati class, meaning not only do they not have spines, they don't have testicles.
00:20:46.040And it's so grotesque because the mechanism of tenure is precisely to make sure that if you were otherwise cowardly by disposition, well, the mechanism of tenure can now serve as the courage that you need to compel you to speak out, because by definition, you can't be fired.
00:21:07.140And most academics, if you go, boo, they suck their thumb and they go into a fetal position.
00:21:13.520I find that so grotesque because it would be so nice in the same way that we select Navy SEALs on their physical abilities, on their bravery.
00:21:24.080It would be nice to have intellectual Navy SEALs in academia, but we certainly don't select on bravery.
00:21:30.020Well, the solution probably isn't within academia, in my sense, you would have an opinion about this.
00:21:39.280It's got to be sort of breaking those rules from the outside in and forcing these old, tired institutions to either follow or die in the process.
00:21:49.220And I think, again, like the fact that there is now a place where young people can, I make up a word called self-curriculate.
00:21:58.900You can actually find the ideas and the thinkers and the books and the explorations that you want.
00:22:06.400And you can do that regardless of who you are, regardless of whether or not you're the right race to get into Harvard.
00:22:16.140And I think that might either discipline these old, tired institutions or just put them out of business.
00:22:21.620I think the only obstacle that I see to what you're talking about, which is that now, you know, knowledge is truly democratized, right?
00:22:30.040You can pick your 20 top professors in any field and go to their lectures online and learn in ways that you couldn't have imagined 15 years ago.
00:22:40.920How do we deal with the imprimatur of the credentials?
00:22:47.460Um, that's, that's going to require like the first brave few, you know, Peter Thiel has spent years encouraging people not to go to college and to go straight into innovation.
00:23:00.060Um, it's, you, you, you need like, uh, first generation people that are going to stick their necks out and do that and make it normal so that, you know, when you go out there to get a job, um, it's not just assumed that, uh, that a degree from, from an accredited government approved university is the best way to judge someone's ability.
00:23:20.180Um, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a cultural institutional shift that requires somebody to go first.
00:23:27.280You know, I, one of the things that, uh, I've been most disappointed in my academic career, and this is now my 30th year, I can't believe it.
00:23:35.700My 30th year as a professor, uh, is that I thought that more academics would be intellectuals and they're not right.
00:23:45.820So, uh, I think you exactly understand what I mean.
00:23:49.000So, so think about the old, you know, continental European public intellectual who could talk about the philosophy of aesthetics.
00:23:56.680If you want, who could talk about formal logic, if you want, who can talk about Austrian economics, if you'd like, he may not be an expert in any of those, but, but that person is a well-rounded intellectual that can speak intelligently about a broad number of fields.
00:24:11.680Christopher Hitchens might be an example of that, even though he didn't have a PhD and he wasn't, of course, an actual academic or a professor.
00:24:19.260I find that academia has become very much careerist oriented so that when I go to, when I first started going to conferences, all these, you know, super fancy academic conferences, and I would try to engage people with ideas.
00:24:33.760Because I, I found a lot of them bafflingly shallow, right?
00:24:39.100Because they knew how to play the game.
00:24:41.720I need to publish a certain number of papers.
00:24:43.840And okay, of course, that's important.
00:24:46.160You have to push the research frontier.
00:24:48.360But can we just go for a coffee and talk about some ideas?
00:24:50.860And so in a sense, I could be reading your book, Matt, and you can exude greater intellectualism than some of my psychology colleagues who've published a hundred papers, who once you ask them about anything short of what they publish on, they're babbling fools.
00:25:10.420And in that way, it's like the bureaucracy in academia feels almost exactly like the bureaucracy in government or the bureaucracy in corporations where, you know, the performative art of doing what you're supposed to do overrules the things that you would really hope that they were capable of doing.
00:25:32.700And I've seen this even in the pedagogic orientation that professors use when, let's say, they're teaching their doctoral students.
00:25:41.580So I've seen colleagues who will teach their doctoral course as a way to game how to publish in certain journals, right?
00:25:52.520So you may or may not know these statistical techniques.
00:25:55.660Well, this journal really wants you to do a mediational analysis.
00:26:01.700And so let me teach you how to do a mediational analysis because it's going to be very unlikely for you to publish in this important journal if you don't do that.
00:26:11.540I mean, nature doesn't abide to your methodology, right?
00:26:15.440In some cases, I might use this methodology, this data analytics technique.
00:26:19.380And so I always found it fraudulent in this, I mean, in an epistemic sense.
00:26:24.980I don't mean fraudulent in the sense that you're cooking the data or plagiarizing a la Claudine Gaye, but it still feels fraudulent to me because you're not saying, I'm interested.
00:26:39.500And by the way, maybe to my credit or maybe it was a fault, I refused to play that game so that I specifically chose to not publish in certain journals because then I would feel inauthentic if I simply responded to the reviewer's quest just so I can get my paper in.
00:26:57.240This is one of the fundamental struggles with academics who are influenced or explicitly of the Austrian tradition and economics is Austrianism, by definition, is sort of multidisciplinary.
00:27:13.820There's history, there's philosophy, there's psychology, there's all of these things that influence what we do.
00:27:20.280And the fetishism about making economics a science has replaced all of that with really esoteric equations that have extracted the humans and their actions out of the whole process.
00:27:34.680So it's very difficult for Austrians to succeed in those kinds of institutional incentives that you're describing.
00:27:42.380Yeah, no, that's beautifully said because, of course, I saw this even in my own training.
00:27:46.620So I was trained in my PhD within the behavioral decision theory framework.
00:27:52.140So, you know, my doctoral supervisor, who's a cognitive psychologist, was, you know, was friends with Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
00:28:02.320One of my professors was Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in behavioral economics.
00:28:07.980And, of course, that approach to decision making is, to your point, is so radically different from the ultra mathematical folks.
00:28:16.380Now, by the way, it's not as though I'm intimidated from mathematics.
00:28:18.880I come from a mathematics background myself.
00:28:21.100But I quickly realized that, as you said, the economists who were, we used to call them the quantoids, they truly did suffer, not to get Freudian, but they did suffer from physics envy, right?
00:28:34.160Because if there's a lot of Greek symbols, then, holy God, I must be doing something important.
00:28:40.300But if you're doing the Austrian stuff, the synthetic thinking, the big thinking, then that's kind of wishy-washy bullshit.
00:28:46.880You need to show me a triple integral for this to be meaningful.
00:28:52.720And do you feel that that's, you know, has there been an auto-correction to that?
00:28:58.120Or has the mathematical orgy continued unabated?
00:29:02.840Well, it continues in academia, but I think it also delegitimizes economics as a profession.
00:29:08.500And the one thing that's even funnier than lawyer jokes or economist jokes, because, you know, we've become a laughingstock because they have created this belief that there's some sort of mathematical formula to figuring out the inputs and the outputs.
00:29:25.720And if you do all of these things, and by the way, we're having the government do all those things to manipulate the economy, we will get X plus one.
00:29:35.780And of course, they're always fundamentally wrong about everything.
00:29:39.180And part of it is that pretense of knowledge.
00:29:42.480This is a Hayek quote, the pretense of knowledge that goes into the scientistic pretensions of fake economics.
00:29:51.140So I didn't know that term from Hayek, but I'm going to link it to one of my former professors for a year-long pro seminar in cognitive studies and my PhD has a paper on the illusion of explanatory profundity.
00:30:10.260And the idea is, I mean, exactly to that point.
00:30:12.380So I then applied that concept to the brain imaging paradigm.
00:30:16.460The idea is that people, when they see a, you know, an image of the brain in a paper with all these colors, because it corresponds to the different lit up regions of the brain, it just feels science-y, right?
00:30:31.100Whereas if I didn't have that, even though that image doesn't predict anything, it has zero explanatory power to anything, but it just feels science-y, right?
00:30:40.700So with one of my current doctoral students, who's kind of lagging his feet, if he's watching right now or listening, we're looking at how something is packaged affects how science-y it feels.
00:30:56.300So you're using these completely irrelevant cues, whether it be the triple integral or the nice brain image, to signal that this is very rigorous, when in reality, it's explaining nothing.
00:31:08.600Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, they're losing their credibility.
00:31:14.280And I think scientism applied all over the place that tragically is undermining the fundamental, essential nature of scientific exploration and discovery.
00:31:26.500And of course, we, we saw that in spades during, during lockdowns and, and our, our religious obsession with Fauciism, right?
00:31:37.180And at some point you start to doubt science instead of doubting the guy that's pretending like he knows what he's doing.
00:31:44.620Yeah. And you, just for, for the viewers, you, you kindly sent me a paper on exactly on that, which I look forward to reading.
00:31:51.360I mean, I guess in a sense, whether it be Fauci or others of his ilk, what they're doing is they are exactly not exhibiting what a true intellectual would, which is epistemic humility, right?
00:32:04.260I mean, the more, and it sounds like a cliche, but it truly is true that the more I know, and I probably know more than most people, the more I realize how little I know, because I'm actually aware of all the knowledge out there.
00:32:17.320And I know nothing. Whereas the people like Fauci, perhaps the God complex, perhaps the white coat, I am science.
00:32:26.460What a grotesque, non-intellectual bent that is, isn't it?
00:32:30.820Well, he's, and he's, this goes back to the academic disease that we're talking about, but it's, it's sort of built into the process when it comes to government action and government bureaucracies.
00:32:42.160And, and all of these, these arrogant people with so much arrogance that they think they can redesign a complex social order.
00:32:55.040And, and, and this, this is one of the fundamental libertarian critiques of, of central planning, generally of, of government attempts to, to redesign the economy is they just don't know enough.
00:33:09.680And they couldn't possibly know enough because the whole purpose of an economy, it's not a place, it's not a thing.
00:33:15.380It's this process of, of people figuring stuff out and taking all of this dispersed knowledge and bringing it together in, in a, in a world that is in real time, radically uncertain.
00:33:28.280Mm-hmm. And if you pretend like you can redesign that from the top down, you're going to have, um, small and catastrophic, um, human disasters.
00:33:38.480Um, ultimately this was the Austrian critique of, of central planning and, and we've seen it play out again and again, but we're still having the same argument.
00:33:46.620What, what, was there some, I mean, I've, I've often asked the following question as applied to the ancient Greeks, where I ask, say, a classicist, what was there in the water that make the, that made the Greek miracle possible?
00:33:59.700Uh, and of course there are several possible answers that one can give.
00:34:02.800Uh, so similar question, what was in the water that made the Austrian way of thinking when it comes to these issues uniquely different from other traditions?
00:34:13.020Well, it, it, um, I'll, I'll make up an answer that I think is mostly true.
00:34:19.400Um, they come from, starting with Karl Menger, who's, who's, uh, um, an economist, uh, living in Vienna, Austria, Ludwig von Mises, inspired by him and some of his students becomes part of the Vienna circle.
00:34:34.560I was going to ask about that. Okay, good.
00:34:36.220Yeah. Famous interdisciplinary, um, hangout where for whatever reason, some of the smartest people in history are gathering together and having arguments and getting coffee and hashing things out.
00:34:49.020Look at this guy. Sorry. I don't know if you know this guy.
00:34:51.880I know his name, but I don't know him that well.
00:34:54.020Oh, you should read his stuff. It's absolutely mind blowing. Kurt Gödel. Go ahead.
00:34:58.000So, so this is all happening. And, um, um, um, in the middle of this, um, this guy, Hitler decides to take over Austria and Ludwig von Mises has to flee to the United States.
00:35:13.720Um, Hayek flees to the London school of economics and, and all of that, that interdisciplinary stuff is, is kind of halted in its tracks, um, to be picked up in other places, but it's probably never quite the same.
00:35:26.720So I think there was probably that, that magical moment where, um, intellectual life was as it should be, where people were willing to put their ideas on the line, willing to have that conversation, willing to listen to people from other disciplines and, and figure stuff out.
00:35:43.620And I think, I think that's where the interdisciplinary nature of, of the Austrian school comes from.
00:35:48.900Oh, I mean, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're speaking to my heart because I'm probably the epitome to, to, to, to, to, to my detriment in academia, the ultimate interdisciplinary and that I've, you know, published in countless, I mean, I've published papers on psychiatric disorders in medical journals while housed in a business school.
00:36:13.020Right. I mean, I have a paper on Munchhausen syndrome by proxy and a Darwinian analysis that what does that have to do with consumer behavior and economic decision-making and nothing, but I didn't care because it, it, it, the, the problem interested me.
00:36:27.960And I said, Oh, I think I've got something hopefully interesting to say about this.
00:36:31.560And so I went for it now, the same university that I mentioned earlier, Chapman, uh, a few years after the first foray of trying to hire me, tried to hire me again.
00:36:42.400And one of the problems that they had with me was that my research while great, I'm using their word while wonderful, was seemed too scattered because I had given a talk where I demonstrated the number of different places where one can apply
00:37:00.680the evolutionary lens. So by definition, I had structured my talk as one that traverses many disciplines to show that the evolutionary lens can kind of unlock the mysteries in many fields.
00:37:12.680They viewed that as a detriment because you have to be a hyper specialist. It's, it's grotesque, Matt.
00:37:19.580And by the way, the, the other, the other factor I think that goes into Austrians and perhaps, um, might very much reflect where, where you and Jordan Peterson have found
00:37:30.660yourself, um, the Austrian school was also defined by the events that, that consumed all around, um, fascism and Hitler on one side, um, Stalin and communism on the other side.
00:37:44.420And here you have these, these classical liberals who believe in, in free people and free markets and, and the free exchange of goods and services and ideas and everything else, uh, surrounded on all sides.
00:37:56.500So I think, um, um, if you look at, um, Mises early work on money and then his critique of, of the failure of central planning and then Hayek's entire, um, project was really a response to central planners, not just socialists, but John Maynard Keynes, who thought he could manipulate the economy through macroeconomics.
00:38:18.380Um, so, so, so what they're known for is their critique of the failures of, of government planning.
00:38:25.440And that, that of course attracts a lot of libertarians, but there's, there's the methodology and the, the intellectual tradition, but there's also the circumstances that force them to explain why these were really bad and anti-human ideas.
00:38:39.140Yes. Very interesting. Uh, of all the different intrusions that a government can, can commit, uh, maybe it's difficult to come up with a hierarchy.
00:38:49.240The one that probably has caused me the greatest amount of pain and most recently over the past few years, as the book royalties of my highly successful books have come in is taxation, right?
00:39:03.060I mean, until the book royalties, I mean, I, I'd written previous books, but they hadn't been so massively successful that it, it, it caused a psychological existential pain.
00:39:15.820And when you're paid as a professor, when the taxes are taken at the source so that you only see half of it right away, then that's a way for you to psychologically kind of swallow it.
00:39:26.580But when you get the money and you take ownership of it in your bank account, because it's not taxed at the source, because my publishers are American.
00:39:35.400So they send me without taxation, but then under the mechanism of world income, Canada and Quebec take, you could go on Jupiter and, and make money there.
00:39:48.140So because I had already exceeded a certain threshold of what my income was, my additional income was taxed at 58%.
00:39:57.920So that now there is something unique, Matt, and you'll agree as a successful author yourself, there is something unique.
00:40:06.520All taxation can be very painful because all people work hard for their money, but royalties are unique in that they are part of the collective knowledge that humanity built.
00:40:17.980Well, that's why Ireland doesn't have taxes on art creation and on book royalties, because they recognize that that's a unique thing.
00:40:23.920Whereas in my case, I only have 42% rights to my neuronal firings, to my personhood.
00:40:32.600So I work from January till about September for the government.
00:40:38.340And in September, the government says, now you keep your money, but not really, because the 42% that you can keep,
00:40:44.920if you spend anything with that 42%, we tax you at 15%.
00:40:53.560Now, before, before you answer, I'm going to answer it for you.
00:40:55.900Could it be that the parasitic state rests on the premise that it requires suckers like me to, to fund the rest of the Ponzi scheme?
00:41:06.380Whereas most people benefit from the parasitic state, and therefore they're never going to speak out against it.
00:41:12.460Go ahead and write other good books, Jew boy, and give us the money.
00:41:16.320The fact of the matter is, and this is a favorite libertarian slogan, taxation is theft.
00:41:26.760And vulgar democracy, where 50 plus 1% of the population gets to do whatever they want to the other 49%, is just outsourced theft to a third party.
00:41:38.980And it's hard to explain this to people because we've been conditioned to expect the government to do X, Y, and Z.
00:41:46.980And there's all these salacious promises that they make us when they're trying to get our votes.
00:41:52.020But it really comes down to two questions like, would you ever cross the lawn to your neighbor's yard, knock on his front door, and hold him up and steal his money?
00:42:05.900Because you have this, this beautiful idea that you're going to, you're going to go help other neighbors, let's say with, with childcare.
00:42:15.200And yet when you go to the voting booth, you do the same, you, you actually do hold up your neighbor based on some promise that some politicians going to make.
00:42:25.400And, and this is, this is a core question about the organization of civil society.
00:42:29.820Do we use cooperation and respect and trade and, and all of these, these beautiful things that we aspire to do, or do we use violence?
00:42:41.380And, and, and my, my view is that you, there's, there's not good government or bad government.
00:42:47.100There's only limited or unlimited government.
00:42:49.660So if you want to limit the amount of theft, you have to limit the size of government.
00:42:58.140So in Canada, and I'm, I'm almost certain that the history of taxation, uh, I mean, personal income tax taxation is roughly the same in the U S I think in Canada in 19 seven until 1917, no income tax.
00:43:10.980Then, oh, we just need, it's going to be very temporary.
00:43:13.520As Milton Friedman said, there's nothing as temporary, uh, there's nothing as permanent as temporary government, uh, you know, services and so on, uh, programs, uh, 1970, oh, we're just going to tax a few people very temporarily.
00:43:26.800And then we watch for the next 105 years where the, the, the orgy becomes parasitic beyond, you know, imagination.
00:43:34.260Could you ever conceive of a time where the fulcrum will swing the other way that we're back to, I don't know, 5% income tax, or that train has sailed and you shall never return to the good old days.
00:43:47.840It's, it's, it's difficult to imagine how to unwind it, which is why I support, I would support a flat income tax instead of replacing it with a national sales tax for the simple reason that no government programs ever going to go away.
00:44:04.240And all we'll do end up doing is adding a value added tax or a national sales tax on top of all these other things, because, because every idea that is, that is, that is implemented by government becomes a monster.
00:44:39.660Once you've, once you've hit that, then you start borrowing money that you can't pay back.
00:44:44.060And there's only so much money you can borrow.
00:44:45.780So the third and most insidious way that governments expand their power is by, is by printing currency and explain, expanding the money supply, which is an explicit transfer of wealth from the have nots, the working class to, to the, all of the special interests and, and, and elites that, that know, they know how to play the game.
00:45:06.240They know how to protect their wealth from, from inflation.
00:45:09.460And that's, that's where we're at now.
00:45:11.440And, and you would think that that would cause a grassroots revolution.
00:45:15.780All you gotta do is go buy a dozen eggs and, and wonder these, like, I, I think it's, they've literally tripled in cost since lockdowns in 2020 at my grocery store.
00:45:27.640This should be a revolution because they're stealing your money, but it's, it's hard to see, right?
00:45:34.280It's, it's, it's obscured by the complexities of, of, of, of money and, and financing and all that stuff.
00:45:41.540So, so no, I, I would be, I would be pessimistic about this, except the possibility of, of the emergence of crypto technologies and cryptocurrencies as, as, as Hayek would have said as an end run around this top-down system.
00:45:59.560I think that's why people like Elizabeth Warren are going bananas about Bitcoin, because they know that, that, that the, these, these sorts of technologies completely undermine the Ponzi scheme of tax, borrow, spend, and print.
00:46:16.180Do you, so earlier I said that one of the reasons why people may not fight back against very high taxation is because they, the, the, the net benefit to them outweighs whatever they pay in taxes.
00:46:28.900I think in Canada, 40% of people don't pay, I think federal income tax and it, you know, the, the, the, the, the histogram of how much the top people pay, it's just, it's just, it's unbelievable.
00:46:40.560It really, and then you hear people saying, oh, but you, you know, why don't you pay your fair share?
00:46:44.520Why do I have to pay 25 times what you pay for the exact same server?
00:46:52.560Why do you, why did you write the, the, the great books that sold a lot, whereas I didn't, and therefore give me your money.
00:46:59.160You owe me that money, but is there, could it also be beyond what I just said?
00:47:03.920Could it be that most people feel helpless to be able to, in any way, alter the Goliath that's moving?
00:47:14.340I mean, what's my voice going to change?
00:47:16.460And therefore, let me just go on in my little life because it is what it is.
00:47:20.020Yeah, I, I think there's a lot of helplessness and, and frustration and just throwing up your hands and, you know, politics is a joke and you don't expect either party to actually do anything that they said they were going to do.
00:47:34.880And if this, I think is ultimately what broke a, you know, I was a tea party organizer and, and, and our whole mantra spontaneously emerged, not from the top down, but, you know, we were for individual freedom, fiscal responsibility, and constitutionally limited government.
00:47:50.720Every activist, every activist, every activist anywhere would say some version of the same thing.
00:47:55.680And they, they sort of heroically rose up and said, you know what, I'm going to get involved in the policy debates.
00:48:01.520I'm going to get involved in the political process.
00:48:04.460I'm going to elect people who are promised to, to sort of live by these values.
00:48:08.660And every step along the way, you know, you, the, we were the precursors to, to the modern conversation where anybody that challenges the government in Washington, D.C., you're, you're called a bigot, you're called a racist, you're called a fascist.
00:48:23.880And these, these, these, these are not new tactics from, from the Alinsky left.
00:48:29.020And, and then, you know, they survived all of that.
00:48:32.260They, they elected Republicans that said they were, they were true to these things, but nothing changed.
00:48:38.800And I think this is how Trump ultimately courted at least some tea party years to come over because he's like, you know what?
00:48:52.000So I, I think, I think, I think people are cynical and frustrated because they have every right to be cynical and frustrated about their ability to reform what is supposedly a representative democracy, supposedly constrained by constitutional limits on government power.
00:49:09.360It's hard to find the American vision in what's happening today.
00:49:13.940If you were to compare, so when I read your, let me just put it up again, people go get this book, 2014, go get it right now.
00:49:22.000As I read it, I mean, you certainly were intimating, you know, there's, you know, there's a revolution coming.
00:49:33.280So if I were to take that optimistic message and fast forward 10 years later, has it improved or has it worse?
00:49:40.180Have people adhered to the clarion call or, or are you more pessimistic than you were in 2014?
00:49:47.200So it's, um, and there's a, there's a chapter, it's been a while since I read it, but I think there's a chapter called the right to know.
00:49:54.040And I'm, I'm, I'm very, um, optimistic about the democratization of, of, of knowledge through technology, um, completely not anticipating.
00:50:05.920Although I, I described the problem as like the, the problem with all of these beautiful technologies is one, they're incredibly liberating, use the right way.
00:50:15.020And two, there are incredibly dangerous way that the government can control us and what we've seen.
00:50:21.080And I think I'll even draw some optimism out of this, but the insane amount of granular censorship to come out of particularly the, um, I'll call it the defense industrial complex.
00:50:33.860The intelligence industrial complex tells me that people with the freedom to figure stuff out on themselves was an existential threat to the, I'll call it the regime.
00:50:47.500This is a libertarian word, but I don't know what to call it, but the machine, right?
00:50:51.240The, like you have this insanely expansive government power structure and they're actually going in and dictating to Twitter employees.
00:51:01.620Hey, this guy just told a joke about, about a politician that we have to stop that.
00:51:05.840Um, it tells me that they're scared and it tells me that, um, um, Elon Musk is, is, it has to be a hero in this story because he blows the lid off of this.
00:51:17.760And there are now, um, plenty of, of new places where people can discover this process.
00:51:23.340So I, I believe in the wisdom of crowds and I believe that these technological tools are, are very much a good thing, but the government has weaponized them against us.
00:51:33.180And we have to figure out how to solve that problem.
00:51:35.380Right. Uh, speaking of Elon Musk, I just today, I retweeted, someone said that, uh, someone had, uh, nominated him for a Nobel prize and I retweeted and I said, I, I second that.
00:51:47.420And as soon as he bought Twitter, I had gone on record.
00:51:50.260I think I'd put out a clip on my channel where I said that of all the great initiatives that he's been involved in, and that's more than probably 10,000 men put together.
00:52:00.140Uh, none will come remotely as historically important as him having opened up the public square.
00:52:07.300Uh, so I'm assuming based on what you said, you would, uh, wholeheartedly agree with that premise.
00:52:12.140Yeah, I would endorse that, but you can also see, um, this gets back to somebody has to go first.
00:52:17.960And, and in a lot of ways, Elon Musk has gone first and he has an insane amount of FU money that, that protects him to a great extent in ways that it wouldn't necessarily perfect for protect a college professor.
00:52:31.360Right. Um, but, but just look at what they're doing to him. Like all of the attacks on, on him and his contracts with, with, uh, with his companies and, you know, Biden himself saying, we got to investigate that guy.
00:52:46.100The intimidation is real. And he just happens to be, um, it looks like he's tough enough, but he's definitely wealthy enough to sort of fight that machine.
00:52:55.640But it's a, it's a, it's an amazing thing that normal people probably don't, um, want to bring that, that sort of, uh, weight down on their families. Right.
00:53:05.500But that's why, by the way, in, in the parasitic mind, in the last chapter, I, I say, you know, activate your inner honey badger. And the reason why I do that, the reason why I use the honey badger and some of my listeners have probably heard me explain this, uh, on a few occasions.
00:53:21.140He don't give a shit. Right. So you see what, you know, the reason why people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are so intimidating because what, what's more intimidating than an animal that if you sting it, it keeps walking.
00:53:34.620If you bite it, I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen this footage. There's a footage where a constrictor has completely suffocated a, uh, honey badger.
00:53:45.480The honey badger finds a way to get out and escape when it's like literally almost dead.
00:53:51.580The instinct, instead of now running as far away from the massive constrictor, it says, I'm going to kill you.
00:54:00.680It comes back, kills the constrictor. There are jackals coming that are trying to steal what he just killed. He fights off the jackals. That's Donald Trump. That's Elon Musk. You may like them. You may not like them, but God damn it. You're going to respect the fact that they're honey badgers.
00:54:17.240Yeah. And that's like, uh, in a very different sense, um, uh, somewhere in my book, I quote probably my favorite quote from Ludwig von Mises about the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur is that guy that looks around the corner of history and imagines a better future.
00:54:34.140You know, maybe it's a product or service or, or whatever it is. And all along the way that the masses are mocking him and laughing at him and trying to stop him and trying to marginalize them. Um, that that's what we need, but that's always what, um, American culture has been about that. Like our founding was an impossibility.
00:54:54.400Yeah. Um, but some, some crazy bastard said, you know what, this, this thing is important to us. We're going to do it. We're probably going to get killed. Um, but we're going to do it anyway, because we have this radical idea that the individual is more important than the government.
00:55:08.760And that, that is a, it's, it's almost, uh, um, immaculate conception kind of thing. I think, I think you could, you could imagine a very few people brave enough in public life to stick their necks out like that. But this is how social change happens. Somebody goes first. Um, other people say, Hey, that looks like a really good idea and I'm not alone anymore. So I'm going to join. And eventually it was everybody's idea in the first place. That's how social change happens.
00:55:38.040Exactly. Well, there's a great quote by, uh, uh, JBS Haldane, who's an evolutionary geneticist, who was also very famous for having these great quips. And I always say that my favorite scientific quote by anyone, and that's saying a lot, there are a lot of very, uh, quotable academics throughout history is one that I actually, uh, put as an epigraph in the last chapter of the consuming instinct, my 2011 book.
00:56:03.020And what basically JBS Haldane argues is that, uh, radical scientific revolutions or ideas go through four stages. I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but I'll kind of, uh, paraphrase it. First stage, when you first are exposed to an idea, oh, this is such bullshit. Stage two, well, this is largely true, but largely unimportant.
00:56:24.500Uh, and then I don't know what the third stage, and then the final stage to your point is, oh, I always thought so. Right. And this has the reason why I love this quote so much, because it's the perfect autobiography to my scientific career, because I tried to come in into the business school and Darwinize it.
00:56:41.940How do we apply evolutionary thinking to understand entrepreneurship, to understand behavioral economics, to understand my area of consumer behavior? And most people said, what, what are you, what are you on? What do you, biology? I mean, if you want to do biology, go study giraffes. You're in a business school. This is bullshit.
00:56:57.700And then, of course, if you're dogged enough, if you're enough of a honey badger, if you are true to the scientific method, the evidence eventually builds up. And then the same person who sent you an email in 1997 and said you were a bullshitter, writes you 20 years later and says, we would be delighted to have you as our plenary speaker. And regrettably for him, I'm an email hoarder. So I kept the email from 97 when you said I was a complete bullshitter.
00:57:25.640And depending on what my mood is that day, I might actually remind you that you gave me that email 20 years ago. So exactly to your point, if you're dogged enough, stick to your principles and hopefully you will win. Before we wrap up, I have one other technical question, then I'll ask you about any current projects you're working on.
00:57:42.060So often when I look at the literature on how political orientation affects something, how is happiness affected by whether you're conservative or liberal? It's always broken up into these camps, conservative, liberal. Is there a rich body of literature that looks, for example, at the psychological profile of a libertarian? Is there a lot of that work? And if not, why not?
00:58:09.080I think the thing that comes to mind is some of the work, great work that Jonathan Haidt has done on this subject. And I am not an expert on this. I'm aware that the libertarian mindset, the don't tread on me, let me work my own path, let me fail and succeed on my own merits.
00:58:31.740I realize that that's not necessarily a normal thing. Neither is processing all of your world around you through logic and the laws of economics.
00:58:44.720So I think we libertarians have to get better at translating our ideas into emotionally compelling stories. And that's where my career has taken me. And my wife and I started Free the People six years ago now.
00:59:02.600And we really just wanted to tell stories and turn people on. There's basically two types of stories, both of which are some version of the hero's journey, right?
00:59:14.420It's either a horrible, oppressive government that has held you back and you fight against that and you succeed or fail. But that is a version of the hero's journey.
00:59:26.200But there's also this beautiful version where you create something beautiful and you do it in cooperation with other people and you help other people and you lift them up.
00:59:36.540And that's where progress in society comes from. We libertarians got to get a little bit better at that second version of the story because we're very good at raging against the machine.
00:59:48.540And it's righteous to do so. But there's some really amazing things that people do when they're left free to cooperate.
00:59:57.680And I think we need to focus on that more to show people like if we're the lost leaders way out front wanting to shift more power to civil society and away from government bureaucrats,
01:00:14.300we've got to show people how it works in practice, not just on a chalkboard.
01:00:19.760Well, of course, I wholeheartedly agree with your sort of the importance of narrative.
01:00:24.760And as a matter of fact, there are evolutionary arguments that support that, you know, we are a storytelling animal, right?
01:00:31.060I mean, that's why literature appeals to us. And so and I've noticed it in my own writing, right?
01:00:36.360So that whenever I'm, you know, in the parasitic mind, I link it to my own personal journey.
01:00:41.700So if I want to talk about identity politics and how that's an idea pathogen, well, what better way than to show you what happens to the perfect society,
01:00:49.100perfect in quotes, that is built on identity politics. It's called Lebanon, right?
01:00:53.340And so now I can take you back to Lebanon and link you to my childhood. That becomes a very powerful narrative.
01:00:59.000So I think you're you're spot on that contrary to the mathematization of economics, people respond a lot more to to narratives than to triple integrals.
01:01:09.320OK, last question, although, of course, I could keep you here for four hours.
01:01:12.860What are some current projects that you might want to tell us about that people need to know about?
01:01:19.980Three things quickly. One is we've we produce a lot of documentaries and a lot of stories.
01:01:28.400I still do some economic explainers because I can't help myself.
01:01:32.140My team is basically a video production cream, a bunch of artists and technologists that know how to both tell a story and hopefully get people to to see it.
01:01:43.660We've we've gotten in the last year and a half into comedy because we've seen the revolution happening where we're comedians starting with Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan,
01:01:54.300Russell Brandt, Russell Brandt, the list goes on and on and on, people that probably came from the left.
01:02:00.160But then then this this speech policing, anti First Amendment authoritarianism coming from the left has pushed them to sort of reconsider.
01:02:10.040It's because comedy is allowed to say things that that apparently the rest of us aren't allowed to say anymore.
01:02:16.780And there's a lot of power in that. So we're doing a lot of comedy in a lot of ways.
01:02:21.320I consider it a gateway drug for young people that are not going to sit through a three hour podcast about Austrian economics.
01:02:29.200But but if you sort of plant some of those nuggets and in shorter, funner bits, that's a good thing.
01:02:35.840So one's called Comedy is Murder because speech is violence.
01:02:39.840And the other is called Adults are Talking.
01:02:42.980Lou Perez, Andrew Heaton, great comedians that we're collaborating with.
01:02:46.980Another project, very different, is something that I'm working on with in cooperation with Senator Rand Paul.
01:02:53.920It's called The Cover Up, and it's a series of investigative conversations with really smart people like like Scott Atlas, who we were talking about earlier, like Jay Bhattacharya, like Rand Paul.
01:03:07.680Probably some of the folks that did the Twitter files.
01:03:10.600But I don't think we have an answer as to what exactly Fauci at all were covering up.
01:03:16.980I think we need to know because we need to make sure that it never, ever, ever happens again.
01:03:22.760And and I've structured it in a way that I don't really have an ending to the story yet because I don't know what exactly what the ending is.
01:03:32.240The first episode is going to be released just in a couple of days.
01:03:34.600And finally, I just bought a copy of your book on happiness because my wife and I are trying to write a series of stories about our life called Love, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
01:03:48.500Oh, and it's and it's a way to to try to get people to appreciate some of these principles principles we've been talking about, but just in the context of our own lives, the ups, the downs, the tragedies, the successes.
01:04:23.440I know you go back to your your childhood to tell fairly devastating stories.
01:04:28.380Well, everybody deals with that stuff, right?
01:04:33.180Everybody in their own lives have to deal with bad things and good things.
01:04:38.000And we got to make it so that we can humanize freedom so that that people can can sort of be passionate about taking the risks that that require that are required of you to get to happiness.
01:04:53.700Well, it does come across in this book, your love and affection for your wife does come through.
01:05:02.060And it actually had had struck me because one of the things that people often say about my public engagement is that, you know, how effusive I am in the public display of love that I have for my wife.
01:05:16.540Actually, my last talk that I gave a few weeks ago, actually, in Montreal, the person who introduced me spent quite a bit of time talking about that.
01:05:23.320So it's lovely to see a fellow man honoring their wives the way that you do.