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Welcome to the Freethought Project Podcast, a hub for free-thinking conversations about the

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promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability. Here are your hosts,

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Jason Basler, Matt Agarist, and Dawn Vi Jr.

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Hello again, free thinkers. Welcome back to the Freethought Project Podcast.

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My name is Jason Basler, and joining me is the Freethought Project Editor-in-Chief,

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Matt Agarist. Also joining us is TFTP writer and editor, Dawn Vi Jr.

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What a week it's been, and it's only Thursday, guys. It's really not easy to keep up with

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all of it. Apparently, the longest U.S. government shutdown in history is now over,

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yet another round of Epstein emails were released, and Trump is again calling a Democrat hoax.

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Apple just launched a digital ID, and a former Capitol Police officer was just forensically

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linked as the J6 pipe bomb suspect. Wow, guys. But don't worry. Don't worry,

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free thinkers. We're all getting $2,000 tariff checks in January that will fix everything.

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We did see some wins, though, this week. Flock cameras that we've spoken about over the past

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few months on this podcast were just shut down in two cities when a Washington judge ruled that

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all footage recorded by flock cameras are public record, according to public record laws.

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So hopefully, that's the beginning of the end for flock.

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Well, guys, we have an exciting guest and powerful show lined up for you today.

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But really quickly, I wanted to remind our listeners that we had author and philosopher

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Stefan Malinu on the podcast last week. It was a great conversation that hit on several

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current topics relating to the rise of Nick Fuentes, censorship, and the culture wars.

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And it was quite a thought-provoking interview. So I hope you will check it out after this

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one. And of course, guys, don't forget to subscribe, rate and review this podcast on your

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favorite podcast player of choice. All right, let's go ahead and get into this.

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Our guest today is a longtime veteran of the Liberty Movement. He's an author, economist,

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and the founder of the Brownstone Institute. Mr. Jeffrey Tucker, thank you for joining us,

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and welcome to the Freethought Project podcast.

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It's my pleasure. Thank you.

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Yeah, well, it's certainly wonderful to have a chance to speak to you. As I mentioned,

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we had Stefan Malinu on the show last week, which was exciting for us. Both of you guys have been

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inspiring figures in my own personal journey into the Liberty Movement. And in fact, Matt and myself

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actually saw you speak over a decade ago now in San Diego at the Libertopia Conference.

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Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Stefan Malinu and I have mutated in various directions over 10 years,

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I guess. You know, 10 years ago, I wrote a very similar article called somebody like,

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Trump is Trump a fascist, right? This is for Newsweek Magazine. And I was very concerned

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about the rise of the so-called alt-right within the Liberty World. That was back when I

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believed that somehow you could somehow contain or direct or otherwise guide the development of

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ideas within the Liberty Movement, which I learned very humbly, was not true. But what was

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interesting is that Malinu, who I had been influential on me, and I felt to be a colleague

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in the previous years, you went full Trumpy and singing the national anthem and dabbling

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in race theory and all this stuff. And I thought, oh, God, here we go. Meanwhile, there were other

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people in the Liberty Land that were going the opposite way. It's like, oh, microaggressions,

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and we've got to embrace woke ideology. And I thought, my God, what is with the Libertarianism

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that's so unstable that it's either drifting right or drifting left? And so I saw my job

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in those years was just kind of finding that golden mean of traditional Libertarianism.

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But in the meantime, 10 years later, there's a whole range of issues on which I sort of decided

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that the rightward drift was understandable and justified. And even in some particulars concerning,

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I don't know, things like deep state control of the media or the corporate state,

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the extent to which the private enterprise corporations were actually just retail

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fronts for the central state, that sort of Trumpy critique was correct. And

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wildly underestimated the extent to which this thing we call the establishment was terrified of

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Trump because of his independence, which is very much to his credit. I also underestimated the

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extent to which woke ideology was completely despotically oppressive for an entire generation

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that had any connection whatsoever to modern academia. So I didn't see any of this stuff

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when I wrote my book on the topic. But there's some particulars on which I've just frankly

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changed my mind, namely the issue of immigration and citizenship and nationalism.

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Those are issues on which I've diametrically opposite views of what I held 10 years ago today.

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And I don't think that makes me alt-right.

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I mean, is that even a term anymore? I feel like that was thrown to the wayside after

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that initial wave there of trying to fearmonger people on the right. And to your point there,

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I do think that there is some legitimate critiques of Steph that we could probably point back to.

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Yeah. And I don't want to single him out, by the way, because he was emblematic of a

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kind of a trend of the time. And you're probably correct about this term alt-right.

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I mean, there's a whole range of people that go to the dark enlightenment and then

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you have the sort of the Fuentes nightmare kind of full-blown interwar late Weimar reactionary.

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There's a whole range of these people out there. And in this context and this framework,

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libertarianism has kind of been plowed under. I think the COVID period was devastating for

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traditional libertarianism. And I've explained many times what went wrong and that sort of thing.

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But anyway, I guess I would just like to say that there was a time when I felt very certain

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that a rightward drift was like a calamity. And now I've come around much more to the views of

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my own mentor, Murray Rothbard, who saw a sort of what he called right populism as being

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sort of a viable strategy for liberty. I'm not sure I would call it that, but I see the

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point he was making now. Yeah. Well, there certainly is a strong headwind in that direction in the has

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been since the COVID era, of course. And we did get into the rise of Nick Fuentes with Stefan Molinou.

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I was kind of curious to hear his ideas on Fuentes and how he holds them as far as the

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censorship and the political persecution and if there was any overlap with his takedown and

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censorship and all that stuff. And I felt like we touched on some pretty good territory there.

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And I even opened up the conversation to Molinou with this principle versus pragmatism

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kind of question just to see where he's at now 10 years later and if he would kind of touch on his

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departure from the libertarian movement. And sure enough, he did. So I felt like there was

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something there giving him the benefit of the doubt. And as you mentioned, he at one point,

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he was kind of a main figure in the voluntaryism, libertarianism movement.

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Oh, yeah, he was huge. I'm not sure what period that was. My imagination places this

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in about, I'm going to say 2012, 2013. Sure. And he was a pretty important figure and

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sort of the rising sort of anarchist spirit. And then he just kind of drifted more and

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more and then I saw where it was going. And my intellectual reaction against that,

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I don't want to call it reaction, but like opposition to that was based on knitting together

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a series of themes that made sense to me at the time, which I now realize I've gotten carried away.

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I don't think favoring immigration restrictions opens you up to fascism.

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I had no longer believed that. And so I don't know, I feel like the last 10 years,

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especially the last five have been really rough and quite an educational opportunity for people

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with our ideological outlook. And it's sort of provoked us to rethink a lot of issues. And

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that's always a good thing. Sure. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think we've all kind of evolved

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a bit and especially after the Biden administration opened the floodgates and

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obviously immigration has always been a political football. And it really is hard also for me

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to believe that the same institution that created this mess, this quote crisis,

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is going to be the same institution that fixes it. But ultimately, there are very few options,

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it seems like, and maybe intentionally so. But one of the reasons I did want to have you on

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as well, Jeffrey, is that because I feel like you've done an amazing job successfully just

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opposing anarchy as something that's classy and electoral, even an aspiring.

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There's that, of course. But I was kind of hoping that we could touch on a few things today,

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maybe a few current topics. Yep. Obviously, Trump was elected to a second term a little

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over a year ago now. He's been in office for like 10 months. But things have kind of hit

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like this fever pitch recently. And I'm sure you've seen it online. There's

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a lot of grumblings on Twitter of Trump betraying his base. And it seems kind of

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significant because it's not just the libertarians or progressives kind of

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saying this, right? It's his own MAGA base, the 50-year mortgage stuff, the doubling down on the

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600,000 Chinese students to come to the US, the H-1B visas. I mean, they're all kind of ruffling

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feathers. Well, and the stimulus payment of $2,000 for people in the... It's a Biden policy.

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Yeah. It was presumably drawn from his glorious tariff revenue, which he continues to claim

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are being paid by foreign countries, which is ridiculous. I mean, I don't know how you

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could say that, but he keeps saying it. And so what you have is small business, wholesale

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wholesalers and importers, paying huge taxes just to sell their products. These are American

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businesses who are paying huge taxes to bring products to domestically. And then out of

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those taxes, you're redistributing wealth back to people that I don't know,

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I'm guessing it could be people who make less than $100,000 or something like that. So I don't

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understand. I mean, this is just classic tax and spend. I mean, it's no different from

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Lyndon Johnson or FDR or any kind of stupid welfare state crap that you'd ever imagine.

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It's embarrassing. It's being done by Trump. The first 100 days of Trump were

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mighty and glorious and tremendously exciting beyond multiple levels. But he has hit... He's bumped

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into the same problem that any state manager is going to bump into, which is that the entire

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machinery of state as it was constructed, the architecture of the state, is made to be

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resilient in the face of demands that it change. And I don't think it's a lack of will. I think

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that it's just an impossible nut to crack at this point. I mean, all of Washington is

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doubling down on permanent Washington's just wants to stay the way it always is.

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And quite frankly, the reformers are wildly outnumbered. You've got a couple

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million people in the state apparatus that are permanent employees, and

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they had hoped to draw down the employment in the federal agencies by half. They didn't come

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anywhere near that. They made some dents, but the courts have intervened. They tried to abolish

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the Department of Education, the courts intervened. They tried to abolish many things.

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This is actually amazing when you think about the excitement in those early days.

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Did you know, I should write about this because it's like historic,

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that there were a couple of days there where the Trump administration had listed

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like 15 or 20 major federal buildings on real estate markets for sale?

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No, I hadn't heard that.

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Yeah, they were going to sell like the Department of Justice, you know, to build a new

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building or whatever. The Department of Housing and Urban Development,

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the Department of Labor. These are huge pieces of property that are built in brutal

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nostalgia. It's ugly things. And part of the thinking was we're going to gut Washington.

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Why don't we just get to revenue and sell these things? And then the people that will move

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into them will be malls and hotels and theaters and this kind of thing. And they'll make

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Washington an exciting, wonderful place for tourists to come and visit. And this was,

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I think, the Trump dream. And we'll just get rid of all these agencies. We'll just gut them.

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And they can restart as purely digital if there's any functions they need to

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finish up. Like HUD has lots of housing contracts. We'll just kind of clean this up.

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So this is the original vision. And so they put these things on sale.

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So then two days later, they came off sale. And I never got a fix on exactly what happened.

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You'd have to really be on the inside of that to know the answers to that.

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But here's what I speculate. That Trump was imagining creating DC into this glorious

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mecca of tourism with the revival of nationalism, where Americans are proud to be America.

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Let's take the family to the great home of the founding fathers or whatever.

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But the main bidders on those buildings were not malls and theaters and other commercial

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attractions. They were like Google and Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies,

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lobbying organizations. They're the ones who wanted the property.

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So now you've got a problem. It's like, okay, well, what are our standards for who can buy

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these properties and who not? And then after two days and trying to figure this out,

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how to keep the properties in the hands of people that would make Washington beautiful

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and wonderful, they just gave up and took them off the market. And now if you go to Washington,

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it'd be far from being the place you want to be. The city is dreary, horrible, sad, dirty,

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crime-ridden, zombie, fentanyl people, flying around all over the place.

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He sent in the National Guard to kind of clean up the place, but all they did

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was hang around the Iserias. I was there when they were there. It was great to be in D.C.

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Do you want a latte? Oh, sure. But they weren't going to the crime-ridden parts because why should

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they? And who's there to make them? So I guess the National Guard is pulled back,

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but meanwhile they leave a city that's dumpier, uglier, and more grotesque than ever.

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So you had this kind of exciting vision going into this. And I'm sorry to say that

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10 months later, the whole thing is just kind of, I think you're right. I mean, there's a sadness

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about the whole thing. And all the Trump administration is doing right now is just

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fighting back against their enemies, I mean, the plot to keep them out of office extends

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all the way back to 2015. And the assassination attempts, the law fair, it was just unbelievable.

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So all these people are still around. And the Trump administration is a tiny group of people.

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I get reporters asking me all the time, wow, how great is it for you? You and your friends,

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you were all out of power five years ago when you protested at lockdowns. But all

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all you people are now in these powerful positions running top agencies. What does that

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feel like? And my answer to that question is it feels like we're still on the outside,

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still fighting for your current battle. We're still we're still being spat upon and trashed

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and denounced. And we don't have any power at actually at all. I mean, the guys at

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Marty McRae and RFK, whatever. And you know, this goes for many people, the Justice Department.

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Yeah, I've got a lot of friends in government now. But none of them have power. They don't have

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the ability to change the system. They try. But it's discouraging. Every day you show up and

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you give orders and everybody ignores them, you know, do you want to make a change in

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something, whether it's a childhood immunization schedule or the grants going out to the universities

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that are funded in DEI or you know, whatever the thing is you want to do speed up drug

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approvals for this or that drug, whatever you want to do, there's a million committees and

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10 million forms and and a thousand people objecting on this ground, this ground to this

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people are being tied down by bureaucratic luliputians, I guess they're called.

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And they can't they can't move. I mean, that's that's the the frustrated part about where we are

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right now. Sure. And I think that's a generous take for sure. And you know, I guess this speaks

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to the idea that there is going to be a top down solution, right? I mean, you've spoken

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for years about decentralized solutions. And I certainly would take a $2,000 check if they

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did sell those buildings off in DC, but I doubt that that and that seems a little more legitimate,

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you know, those are taxes that are already paid for. That would make sense, right?

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Right, right. You tell the building to give the money, the profits to the taxpayers. That's

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right. But but speaking of, you know, DC kind of turning into this hellhole, pun intended,

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you know, I think one of the things that the MAGA base was the most frustrated about

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was seeing Trump invite the Syrian interim president and former ISIS commander,

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Abu Muhammad al-Jilani to the White House recently. And I think Glenn Greenwald said it

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perfectly. He said, imagine going back 20 or even 10 years and telling somebody that in 2025,

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a long time leading al-Qaeda operative in Syria will be welcomed to the White House

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as an honored state leader. I think that's a real poignant point. I mean, Trump even gave

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him a bottle of cologne, like men's fragrance as a gift, you know? And so I think this kind of touches

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on a nerve that a lot of Americans have been frustrated about regarding the U.S. government

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training, equipping and putting these terrorist groups in power in the Middle East, only to

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scapegoat them when it's politically convenient, but then also doing the photo ops and inviting

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them to the White House when it's politically advantageous. So I kind of wanted just to

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get your take on all this, like what you make of it, what's the motive, what's the play?

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Is he just tone deaf to what his base wants as far as this goes? Is there a bigger picture

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that we're missing? Well, yeah, Trump has a love-hate relationship with the base, right?

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I mean, so that's, you know, he wants to placate the base, but also he betrays him

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whenever possible, knowing full well they have no wills to turn. And it's been true on

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justice for the COVID period, you know, but trying to the shots, the foreign policy stuff is

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supposed to be America first, but it's not. But he's also profoundly aware that

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regular people, they loathe establishment Democrats. I mean, they're the most horrible

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people. And if Camel had taken over, I don't even know how dystopian the world would look

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today. I mean, it's pretty bad, but it would definitely be worse. They wanted to shut down

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the internet. I mean, that was their plan. Brownstone.org would have been confiscated.

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This podcast might be illegal. I mean, but we're seeing take place in the UK right now would

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have just been the beginning if Camel had won. So, and as it is, you know, as it is the

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Trump administration's giving us terrible things like real ID, you know, that I think that

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that plan for real ID had been in place for, you know, I don't know, 10 or 15 years.

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And nobody had implemented it until the Trump administration. So,

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so I don't know, you know, it's, I guess we're back to the old American problem

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of pick your poison or something like that. I don't, I don't quite, I would not say the

24:02.350 --> 24:07.650
Trump administration poisoned. There's a lot of good efforts. Let me just put it that way.

24:07.650 --> 24:14.830
Good efforts being made in some sectors. But, but as soon as you get, just as soon as you

24:14.830 --> 24:19.530
start feeling good about it, something, something new, terrible thing, you know, happens. Trump's

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obsession with tariffs and protectionism is just, just off the hook, cray-cray is just,

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just out of control. Like he actually thinks it's like some sort of magic policy. It's

24:36.670 --> 24:42.390
oh god, I just really hope the Supreme Court, it turns back his tariff power. And, and by the way,

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so do many other people within the Trump administration. Everybody just gets sick of his,

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his crazy attitudes on this. And then, you know, he's so mercurial, you know, he'll say one thing,

24:53.630 --> 24:57.790
one day, and then just forget, forget he ever said it the next day. So it's hard to follow

24:57.790 --> 25:02.510
up on my game. He says a lot of good things. And then you get all excited, then he forgets

25:02.510 --> 25:08.250
about them. Like, by that evening, you know? It's because we have cognitive dissonance in this

25:08.250 --> 25:13.270
country at let levels that have never before seen in human history, right? Kind of. I mean,

25:13.470 --> 25:17.190
because people are intellectually dishonest and they're dishonest with themselves. Like what you

25:17.190 --> 25:20.670
said earlier, where you, you know, you admitted that your principles have shifted pretty

25:21.250 --> 25:25.950
significantly over the last decade. And I mean, that's because, you know, many of us who

25:25.950 --> 25:31.810
started this journey over a decade ago, in this black and white world of pure anarchism,

25:31.810 --> 25:36.850
you know, we have to grapple with like, the world is a far more full of new haunts, right? Like,

25:36.850 --> 25:41.630
and Captain Stan is not coming tomorrow, right? So we have to live in this world. And it's,

25:41.650 --> 25:46.550
we have to figure out what is the transition path, you know, and what are the priorities?

25:46.930 --> 25:50.550
You know, this is where it gets complicated. Yeah, that's the question I had for you.

25:50.590 --> 25:54.110
So like, I want to, you know, I want to contrast like your honesty with like the

25:54.110 --> 25:58.610
profound dishonesty at the heart of the mainstream conservative movement right now.

25:58.610 --> 26:01.890
So you've admitted you, you know, you shifted right a little bit over the last decade. So,

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you know, as, as we're recording this podcast, right, we saw people like yesterday, I was

26:06.770 --> 26:10.230
scrolling Twitter and all these people, like the conservative twins, they're these two,

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I don't know, like influencers, they're, they're, they're huge. And they were

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celebrating this $20,000, I mean, $20,000 stimulus checks for Americans that make

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under $100,000 as like a win for America. You know, they were like, this is far,

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this is, but I'm like, dude, this is, that's not first off, supporting that is not conservative.

26:28.650 --> 26:33.810
Second off, it's not a win at all. They're going to print this money from the Federal Reserve and

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further devalue the dollar that everybody else, you know, is already struggling to buy groceries.

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This is going to buy Americans like three or four. That's hot money on the streets, right?

26:42.950 --> 26:45.710
So it's a hyperinflation. Right. I mean, that's not, that's,

26:45.770 --> 26:48.810
there's nothing conservative about that. This is the same status garbage that,

26:48.890 --> 26:53.330
that Biden did during COVID with his stimulus checks. And it's not just the stimulus checks

26:53.330 --> 26:56.690
either, right? It's like, it's the cheering for the National Guard deployments and the cities.

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It's the embrace of these terrorists. It's the total abandonment of limited government. It really is.

27:02.310 --> 27:05.930
Like, they're like, give us that standing army that the forefathers warned us about. You know,

27:05.990 --> 27:11.750
that's conservative. So my question is, it's a two-parter, man. So what, what do you think

27:11.750 --> 27:17.650
causes this profound cognitive dissonance? Like, why are people so, who call themselves

27:17.650 --> 27:21.590
conservative now, like such the biggest cheerleaders for these policies that

27:21.590 --> 27:28.630
are objectively statist? And, and to follow that up, if this is just what the system does,

27:29.190 --> 27:33.370
if the very nature of political power is to corrupt principles and turn every movement

27:33.370 --> 27:38.610
into like a parody of itself, then how on earth can we continue to expect this very system

27:38.610 --> 27:41.490
to be the solution to the problem that it created?

27:42.010 --> 27:46.790
Yeah, I, of course, I, you know, I wish I had all the frequent answers to your questions.

27:46.790 --> 27:52.150
But I don't, you know, it's very easy to say, well, we should decentralize and create

27:52.150 --> 27:56.310
parallel systems. And of course, that's true. And, you know, everybody's working really hard on that.

27:56.510 --> 28:01.630
But, but you still have this problem of this gigantic corporate state that were the biggest,

28:01.710 --> 28:08.230
meanest, most monstrous corporate state in the history of humanity is still exists. And

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it's a grave threat and something has to be done to tear it down, right?

28:12.250 --> 28:16.770
Maybe the best way to think about what's happening right now is it's round one. I

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do think it's important to recognize something that, and speaking from the standpoint of history,

28:26.270 --> 28:31.410
the Trump administration has tried to be reformist in the sense that they attempted,

28:31.890 --> 28:38.590
they attempted a hostile takeover of Washington. That, this is the very first time in a hundred

28:38.590 --> 28:44.430
years that anything like this has ever happened. The administrative state, as we know it, began

28:44.430 --> 28:49.590
to be built sometime in the 1890s, but it didn't really get going until after World War I.

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And it's just grown and grown and grown and grown to be this terrible fourth branch of government

28:54.250 --> 28:59.610
about which people have known very little, but is actually in charge of the system. They work

28:59.610 --> 29:04.830
very tightly with all the corporations, with media, you know, so they have a retail branch,

29:04.830 --> 29:13.450
you know, and it's a beast of unfathomable size, depth, and broadness of scope.

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And every president in the course of the 20th century has gotten elected, discovered that this

29:21.150 --> 29:30.430
was true, that he was really just a powerless putz. And he names cabinet ministers like, I'm the head

29:30.430 --> 29:34.390
of housing, I'm the head of labor. And they get to good parking place and then a nice office

29:34.390 --> 29:41.330
and then everybody tells them to go fuck themselves. So, you know, whatever my language. So now you had,

29:41.450 --> 29:46.010
you had, I'm not sure if you still, yeah, I'm going to say you kind of still do, you have an

29:46.010 --> 29:52.310
administration in office that's desperately trying to do something about this problem in the

29:52.310 --> 29:58.450
sense that like, give power back to the people, power of inconsistently apply that that is, and

29:58.450 --> 30:04.250
they've had a little bit of success in some areas. But all of official Washington's pushing back

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on it. And so maybe this is just round one. I don't know, this is the first time anything like

30:09.350 --> 30:19.010
this has ever been attempted. And so I'm sympathetic. But, but they're not making a great deal of

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progress. I would have, I think I would have expected more progress and we're just not seeing

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it. I mean, they had beautifully laid plans. But by the 100th day, it looked like they just

30:29.570 --> 30:35.070
lost steam. And now here we are, you're going into this dark winter months and everybody's just down

30:35.070 --> 30:39.490
in the mouth like, Oh, God, I guess the system can't be reformed. Well, I don't know, maybe,

30:39.650 --> 30:44.670
maybe it can at some uncertain point in the future. I, I'm all for parallel systems, all for

30:45.130 --> 30:49.390
decentralization, all this stuff is great. But we have to dismantle this machinery at the top

30:49.390 --> 30:54.030
one way or the other. We've got to, we've got to get rid of it. I'm not sure how we've

30:54.030 --> 31:01.150
never like history doesn't tell us what this looks like when you have a corporate administrative

31:01.150 --> 31:08.390
hegemon that's running essentially everything outside of any kind of democratic mandate.

31:09.150 --> 31:15.670
You know, how does such a system get uprooted? And I don't think we know the answer to that.

31:16.550 --> 31:23.810
Yeah, man, absolutely. And one of the things that I definitely want to touch on, you know,

31:23.850 --> 31:28.970
when we're talking about this, like corporate administrative hegemon and, you know, the sort

31:28.970 --> 31:34.190
of juxtaposition between, you know, some of the decent things that the administration may have had,

31:34.190 --> 31:39.090
you know, in the works in the first 100 days versus, you know, now what we're seeing

31:40.010 --> 31:47.370
really with this massive push and embrace of technocracy within the Trump administration,

31:47.590 --> 31:54.570
particularly the figures like Peter Thiel and Palantir, Larry Ellison and Oracle and the way

31:54.570 --> 32:01.250
that they're very quite obviously marching in lockstep to implement some of these same agendas

32:01.250 --> 32:05.370
that are on the board for, you know, Civil World Economic Forum when it comes to

32:05.370 --> 32:11.090
agenda 2030 and the digital ID, mass surveillance, carbon credits, and even with the way that the

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manufactured border crisis has been utilized to sort of create or rather expect upon this police

32:19.090 --> 32:26.270
state on the US border further implementing biometric surveillance and all these sorts of things.

32:27.090 --> 32:31.110
And, you know, so where do you see it going in that regard?

32:31.110 --> 32:35.890
This is a terrifying prospect. I mean, what I've begun to understand,

32:37.970 --> 32:45.910
this is very difficult for libertarians to conceive of, but a lot of that crowd and I have

32:45.910 --> 32:52.730
to include to some extent Elon Musk in this, but I guess Peter Thiel is a better example of this.

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When they're attacking the, when they're attacking government, they're attacking

32:57.370 --> 33:02.390
analog government and old fashioned government, right? Like public to public sector.

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What they want is to set up their own privatized government that's in league with the remnants

33:09.710 --> 33:14.590
of whatever state they leave in place that is much more profitable, much more powerful,

33:14.690 --> 33:20.730
much more effective, much more intrusive. I mean, I don't know at what point this

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occurred to me. Maybe it was like day 120 or something like that. I suddenly had this thought

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in my head, what if they dismantle the old fashioned analog state and build a dystopian

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largely privatized technocratic state? And we all in five years from now look back and go,

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geez, she was better in the old days. This is the terrifying thing. And I tell you what,

33:58.810 --> 34:04.010
we need to start broadening our understanding of what the state is. And I'll just give you a

34:04.010 --> 34:13.130
quick example. So Brownstone uses Amazon services for its publishing. And we have

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20 books and we don't keep inventory. If you order the book, they print the book and they send

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it up. And we make some money from that. And mostly we get the word out and it's all good. And,

34:24.710 --> 34:29.130
you know, the old ethos of the internet, we're all cooperating together. Oh, we don't have to

34:29.130 --> 34:33.350
do everything because other people are going to help us to do it. And we have this divisional

34:33.350 --> 34:39.770
labor and everything that everybody trusts everybody. Well, maybe yesterday I tried to

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log in to see how book sales were going. They said, up, you need to be verified.

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I do. Yeah. Do you have a choice? You have to get verification.

34:50.110 --> 34:55.530
I said, here we go. So I went in there and I said, okay, click the, and we've all done this.

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You click the button to get verified. Well, why do I need to get verified? And everything's

35:00.010 --> 35:06.430
been fine. I've been using Amazon print on demand now for 10, 20 years. It's never

35:06.430 --> 35:10.970
been a problem. Suddenly, now they want all my data. Next thing you know, I'm standing in front

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of the camera. I'm holding up a passport. I'm coughing up my home address and phone number.

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And, you know, like, so now suddenly Amazon knows absolutely everything about me and they said,

35:22.090 --> 35:28.130
okay, thanks very much. Took all my data and went, went off with it. It was like,

35:28.150 --> 35:34.410
what are they doing? But keep in mind that Amazon has a contract worth tens of billions

35:34.410 --> 35:40.430
of dollars from the National Security Administration to host and the CIA to host

35:40.430 --> 35:46.630
their website, their data for them. I mean, Amazon is a government company.

35:47.390 --> 35:53.050
Yeah. Right. So it's great. They send you a bar of soap and a package of noodles and they bring

35:53.050 --> 35:57.250
it to your front door. That's tremendous. That's not what their money is, right? The

35:57.250 --> 36:05.730
money is in obsequious service to the intelligence community. That's where their money is. And that's

36:05.730 --> 36:10.810
that's that's what they do. It's an it might as well be a division of the CIA at this point.

36:11.310 --> 36:16.770
And so when they're asking for your data, you know, this is like, it's a CIA wrote you and

36:16.770 --> 36:19.730
said, I'm going to do it. I would say, yeah, what about my rights? But Amazon,

36:20.110 --> 36:24.030
oh, shit. Okay. I'll go ahead and do it. So this is this is the

36:25.810 --> 36:31.290
your question about technocracy is really important. I think what we need to start realizing is that

36:31.970 --> 36:36.230
that the Teals and the Palantirers of this world and to some extent with the Trump

36:36.230 --> 36:42.210
administration is the handmade is setting up a different kind of state than we've ever seen

36:42.210 --> 36:47.410
in human history. The most intrusive, the most surveillance oriented, the most privacy

36:47.410 --> 36:53.630
invading and potentially the most powerful state you can imagine because they can control your life

36:53.630 --> 36:59.570
without guns and cops and military. They can control it by cutting off access to your bank,

37:00.030 --> 37:07.410
shutting down your car, locking you out of your home, essentially ruining your life. And you'll

37:07.410 --> 37:12.430
do anything to keep that from happening. So therefore they can control you, you know,

37:12.430 --> 37:19.050
entirely. Yeah, excellent points. And I think the point that really concerns me as well as

37:19.050 --> 37:23.410
free market enthusiasts, you know, these are private companies. So on the one hand,

37:23.830 --> 37:27.990
we might even have some Ancaps or Republicans who are cheering this on, right?

37:28.310 --> 37:34.450
Oh, entirely. We saw this in COVID, you know, when when the private companies want to impose

37:34.450 --> 37:44.090
vaccine mandates, all the usual dunderheaded, stupid chicken heads in the libertarian movement said,

37:44.530 --> 37:46.610
well, they're private companies that can do whatever they want.

37:46.770 --> 37:50.930
Yeah. Not understanding that these, the edicts were coming straight from government,

37:50.930 --> 37:54.790
that the products that are imposing on their employees were never part of their labor contract.

37:55.270 --> 38:02.030
And the products are themselves shielded from all liability claims. So if your, if your

38:02.030 --> 38:11.810
company kills you, you have absolutely no recourse. That is not a free market. And yet, sure enough,

38:12.470 --> 38:17.010
libertarians very reliably went out there and said, the private companies can do whatever they want.

38:17.590 --> 38:23.070
So I think we need to get a little more careful about thinking about, about these companies. You

38:23.070 --> 38:27.370
know, what's a private company is the Portuguese bakery down the street from me. Okay, that's

38:27.370 --> 38:36.470
definitely a private company. Google, Facebook, Amazon. I don't know. They're main clients and

38:36.470 --> 38:39.910
customers of the government themselves. And if the customer is always right under capitalism,

38:40.150 --> 38:44.450
means the state's always right. So they're, they're retail branches of the government.

38:44.590 --> 38:49.610
I would say the same thing is true of, of pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS, you know,

38:50.010 --> 38:54.150
they, they're the ones who took ivermectin off the shelves, wouldn't distribute Hydrox

38:54.150 --> 38:59.050
Chloroquine, even though it's prescribed by the doctors. They're the main distributors of the, of

38:59.050 --> 39:04.890
the shots. You know, they are the retail branch of the government. And like you, you need to

39:04.890 --> 39:10.470
realize this if you want to have a sophisticated understanding of the way the world really works.

39:11.150 --> 39:14.670
Yeah. Oh, 100%. It's the worst type of cronyism.

39:15.130 --> 39:15.330
Yeah.

39:15.650 --> 39:20.930
Let's take it at a level deeper here. Speaking of KYC and these types of things. I know

39:20.930 --> 39:27.070
you were one of the earliest voices that I heard about talking Bitcoin. And probably back in 2013,

39:27.070 --> 39:31.870
I had no idea even what it was. And it's crazy to think that now it's trading over 100K per coin,

39:31.970 --> 39:36.170
you know, but over the past few years, the Bitcoin brand has shifted. It's kind of gone

39:36.170 --> 39:41.730
more mainstream. It's treated more like a stock or a digital gold and Satoshi's original

39:41.730 --> 39:45.850
peer to peer vision. It seems to have faded, you know, the one that could disrupt central

39:45.850 --> 39:51.390
banking. It seems to be completely gone. And there's this new narrative that's kind of emerged.

39:51.630 --> 39:56.150
And people like Roger Vier has argued that Bitcoin was hijacked by special interests. And he even

39:56.150 --> 40:01.690
published a book about that last year. Glad that he's free, of course. But some even go further.

40:01.970 --> 40:05.270
And I'm really curious about your thoughts on this. Some suggests that it could have been

40:05.270 --> 40:10.070
an intelligence operation from the very start. We just had a guest who spoke about this

40:10.070 --> 40:14.530
a couple podcasts back. And with, you know, these state back stable coins entering the

40:14.530 --> 40:19.210
mix, it does feel like crypto is unfortunately being kind of absorbed into the very system that it was

40:19.210 --> 40:23.130
meant to challenge. So yeah, like what are your thoughts on the current state of Bitcoin and

40:23.130 --> 40:27.230
crypto more broadly? And has the movement been co-opted by these institutions?

40:28.210 --> 40:32.510
It's definitely been co-opted. I mean, I'm not sure what point it happened. I think it

40:32.510 --> 40:37.870
was going to be like, so I got involved with Bitcoin. I think my first article was 2010.

40:38.170 --> 40:43.430
But by January 2013, I was all in very excited. I don't know, maybe it was an

40:43.430 --> 40:49.390
intelligence thing for the beginning. My guess is there was a team that invented that released

40:49.390 --> 40:55.170
the protocol. And they used good guy frontman who wrote all the rhetoric, you know, like the

40:55.170 --> 41:00.090
white paper and all the rest of it. But they were black hats as part of the development team,

41:00.830 --> 41:06.270
probably intelligence officials that had left open this great question of the block size

41:07.070 --> 41:12.850
for the future. And as soon as it started to scale, as soon as it started to get adopted,

41:13.270 --> 41:23.250
we're talking about 2014, 2015, they constrained the block size so that

41:24.110 --> 41:30.650
it was necessarily the case that it slowed down and became more expensive than

41:30.650 --> 41:41.130
alternative methods of transmitting money, old fashioned dollars. And then

41:41.750 --> 41:47.270
there was the same period when Venmo was made in squares, suddenly you could charge credit cards

41:47.270 --> 41:53.330
over, micro payments became possible even with conventional credit cards, and then Zell and

41:53.330 --> 42:02.250
whatever. All these other alternative means of bypassing ACH were suddenly innovated at the very

42:02.250 --> 42:08.790
same time that Bitcoin became essentially unusable. When I remember 2016, I was starting to send

42:08.790 --> 42:14.050
some Bitcoin to a friend and I realized it was going to cost me more to send than the money

42:14.050 --> 42:19.810
I was sending. I was going to send 20 bucks and it was $60 to somebody to send it. What

42:19.810 --> 42:24.810
happened to my old friend? Well, this was the throttling of the block size. They deliberately

42:24.810 --> 42:30.630
made it so that the damn thing couldn't scale to become what we all believed it was supposed to be.

42:31.350 --> 42:35.550
And this was definitely done by the core development team, the core developer team,

42:35.650 --> 42:40.130
which is the biggest bunch of jerks you've ever met in your life. I went to a Satoshi

42:40.130 --> 42:45.650
round table about this period and the core developers were just snooty and kept to

42:45.650 --> 42:51.130
themselves. They wouldn't go to the sessions with us. Even when they go into the swimming pools,

42:51.210 --> 42:56.450
they would go over there swimming by themselves and not talking to anybody else. These were some

42:56.450 --> 43:05.750
real bad guys and they're the ones that kept the block size where it was. And then there's

43:05.750 --> 43:12.670
a big controversy about Segwit, I guess it was, some method by which it could scale,

43:12.670 --> 43:17.070
but they kept talking about second-layer solutions and color color and fellas crap.

43:17.250 --> 43:22.050
And then famously came along the huddle movement. So the huddle movement was

43:22.710 --> 43:27.010
a direct contradiction to everything that happened the previous five years. So the

43:27.010 --> 43:32.310
previous five years is like adopt Bitcoin, use Bitcoin to pay. Oh, accept Bitcoin on your

43:32.310 --> 43:36.690
retail site. Oh, use Bitcoin when you're making purchases and everybody would see

43:36.690 --> 43:40.830
it with that. Because why would we do that? Because that's the essence of money. Like

43:40.830 --> 43:46.010
if you get it into wider use, it becomes more like a money. There's no such thing as a money

43:46.010 --> 43:51.270
that you don't use. It's ridiculous. Well, suddenly the huddle movement came along,

43:51.510 --> 43:55.810
huddle, don't spend your Bitcoin, don't accept Bitcoin, don't adopt Bitcoin,

43:56.070 --> 44:02.170
just all the OGs, hang on to what you have and let's all get rich. That was it. And

44:02.170 --> 44:07.510
it was just unbelievable that this happened. So it was a complete betrayal. If anybody

44:07.510 --> 44:11.490
doubts the story, this should look at Roger Veer's book. I wrote the introduction to it.

44:11.950 --> 44:17.830
He lays it out in great detail. It was definitely intelligence level deep state plot to destroy

44:18.630 --> 44:25.630
this great innovation, direct it into a new path. And then Roger, of course,

44:26.010 --> 44:34.830
I think became a champion of the forking with Bitcoin Cash, which had some promise,

44:34.830 --> 44:39.830
but then that was forked. And then now there's 100,000 other cryptocurrencies out there.

44:40.030 --> 44:44.110
The only ones that are really promising are the ones that are the private coins. Because

44:45.090 --> 44:54.370
the old fashioned Bitcoin or whatever is as a financial technology, it is traceable to a much

44:54.370 --> 44:59.950
greater extent than your current dollar based bank account. They only keep records

44:59.950 --> 45:05.150
in your bank for like seven years or something. Bitcoin is forever. Everything you've ever done

45:05.150 --> 45:11.430
with Bitcoin is going to last forever. And law enforcement or just a disgruntled family member

45:11.430 --> 45:19.910
and a court filing, your life is unfolds before everyone else's eyes forever long after you're

45:19.910 --> 45:24.650
dead. So that's the essence of the blockchain. It's like a gift to the government like

45:24.650 --> 45:30.430
nothing else in human history. Exactly. It's almost like the CIA created it.

45:33.490 --> 45:39.010
It's such a wild contrast to where we were with this like 10 years ago. And as Jason mentioned,

45:39.410 --> 45:44.410
we saw you speak. We actually talked for a little while in Libertopia. We were there at

45:44.410 --> 45:49.990
representing the Free Thall project. And you were one of the first people to champion

45:49.990 --> 45:56.050
Bitcoin's utility, even mentioned using it to like buy some extracurricular substances online.

45:56.710 --> 46:00.230
And I loved it, man. It was cool. It's a perfect example of the permissionless,

46:00.330 --> 46:04.510
you know, censorship resistant power. But things are much different now. And we're

46:04.510 --> 46:10.270
realizing that and, you know, that early like anarchic utility is a million miles away from

46:10.270 --> 46:14.550
what we're seeing today, you know, million miles away. It's been one of the most

46:14.550 --> 46:23.270
devastating things in my life is to have my, you know, my techno utopian dreams of anarchy by

46:23.270 --> 46:29.850
virtue of technology, shepherded by technology, that that dream that that I wrote about, you know,

46:29.890 --> 46:34.690
so lovingly in two books, one was called It's a Jetsons World, the other is called A Beautiful

46:34.690 --> 46:39.450
Anarchy. And they were just they embodied the ethos of the time. And well, none of that

46:39.450 --> 46:45.010
became true. Yeah, none of it. And it just became even worse. So today I was reading for the first

46:45.010 --> 46:51.450
time, a central bank has purchased a portfolio of Bitcoin, the Czech national bank, and a bunch of

46:51.450 --> 46:56.530
US dollar peg stablecoins. Imagine that. And also some tokenized dollar deposits. So

46:57.050 --> 47:00.190
now they're framing it as they're like they're saying, you know, it's just a little test

47:00.190 --> 47:04.470
to gain experience. And of course, you know, they came out and simultaneously came out today

47:04.470 --> 47:09.070
and reiterated that they're never going to use Bitcoin as a reserve asset. But this isn't

47:09.070 --> 47:14.190
like an isolated incident. It's part of the exact same thing that Jason and I have been talking about

47:14.190 --> 47:18.750
on this podcast and Don too, you know, we saw the Trump administration create the strategic

47:18.750 --> 47:23.470
Bitcoin reserve back in March, and that kind of gave all the crypto bros a little like help.

47:23.710 --> 47:27.690
But you know, this is a Trojan horse. And we've been talking about that for a long time.

47:28.290 --> 47:33.030
And now we're seeing central banks actively buying. And we're watching this co option

47:33.030 --> 47:37.890
happen right in real time. And they're not just buying Bitcoin, right? They're lumping

47:37.890 --> 47:41.970
in with stablecoins and these tokenized coins that are going to be even worse than CBDCs.

47:42.690 --> 47:46.590
And this is the end game like what would feel and what we're just talking about this,

47:47.070 --> 47:51.510
the technocratic or the technologic utopia that you mentioned is basically this is the

47:51.510 --> 47:56.850
other side of that coin where it's a fucking it's a technocratic dystopia. And where central

47:56.850 --> 48:01.630
banks absorb the technology of crypto not to embrace like permissionless money, but to

48:01.630 --> 48:06.170
hijack Bitcoin brand and legitimize their own real goal, you know, of tokenized bills,

48:06.170 --> 48:12.830
regulated stablecoins, like total black rock style financial surveillance. And

48:12.830 --> 48:18.730
as you mentioned, you know, privacy coins, like I know I have, well, I know Jason does too,

48:18.790 --> 48:23.050
we have our own specific tools that we think are the ways out of this like like Xano,

48:23.430 --> 48:27.490
you know, like things that are private by default and technologically incapable of being

48:27.490 --> 48:32.010
co opted. But from your perspective, what do you what do you think is the solution to this

48:32.010 --> 48:37.690
problem? Like how do we stop this? Maybe not so much hijacking how do we how do we stop this

48:37.690 --> 48:46.090
or the fight against this tyrannical surveillance money that is one of the saddest things that

48:46.090 --> 48:51.330
I've witnessed is the way in which the entire Bitcoin community that I helped shepherd into

48:51.330 --> 48:58.310
being has been completely co opted by power. And I'm not even sure how many of them even

48:58.310 --> 49:03.350
know it. You know, I've tried to explain it to them many times. I have a very, very good friend

49:03.350 --> 49:13.110
of mine who I trust a lot. Who's a good guy, you know, and a good solid Rothbardian libertarian

49:13.110 --> 49:21.230
anarchist type and brilliant person. But he got all excited about Bitcoin maximalism.

49:22.430 --> 49:26.770
And I've never been able to talk him out of it. You know, he's every other coin is

49:26.770 --> 49:32.290
only because it matters. Well, it turns out the only thing he really cares about with regard to

49:32.290 --> 49:39.030
Bitcoin is making money. Yeah. And it was like, you know, but but my friend, that wasn't supposed

49:39.030 --> 49:45.050
to be the idea. The idea was to create a freedom technology that would usher in, you know,

49:45.770 --> 49:51.790
human rights and privacy and freedom. You know, it wasn't really about just

49:52.630 --> 49:58.610
fattening your bank account. Then he'll just respond to me like, Oh, shut up. I don't care

49:58.610 --> 50:03.790
about your fucking idea, your ideals or whatever. I bet your ideals. You're just you're just mad

50:03.790 --> 50:09.610
that you bailed out of Bitcoin, you know, and and and are not rich as a result.

50:10.430 --> 50:15.710
You know, I don't know. I don't know how long it's been true that revolutionary movements

50:15.710 --> 50:20.830
just get entirely bought off by a promise of social prestige and money

50:22.010 --> 50:27.790
and career goals and that kind of stuff. But I tell you, it's depressing to see the way this has

50:27.790 --> 50:32.670
happened to the Bitcoin community. It's just sad to me. And I know there's some people who are

50:32.670 --> 50:37.030
doing this and they don't, you know, part of the maximalist thing that they don't know what

50:37.030 --> 50:42.050
they're involved with. But I'm immediately my hackles go up as soon as somebody described

50:42.050 --> 50:46.570
myself as a Bitcoin maximalist, I just back way off. I think, okay, you may not be deep state,

50:46.690 --> 50:53.070
but you might be. Yeah, I got a certainly a whiff of that. I was at the Bitcoin conference

50:53.070 --> 50:58.250
in Vegas this past year and in 2025, I got free press passes. The only reason why I was there.

50:58.890 --> 51:03.530
But yeah, it's certainly all focused on the maximalism side of things. And they're

51:03.530 --> 51:08.110
they're all in, you know, they're all so excited about it. I just it's hard for me

51:08.110 --> 51:14.310
to be on board with that. Even though we've seen it develop from its infancy, just knowing where it's

51:14.310 --> 51:20.570
at now, it's truly hard to really support it. And this kind of brings me to another point here. Matt

51:20.570 --> 51:25.890
just mentioned BlackRock. And I kind of want to talk about BlackRock because it feels even more

51:25.890 --> 51:30.270
dystopian than the hijacking of Bitcoin. Because just recently, you know, Larry Fink

51:30.270 --> 51:34.670
announced the beginning of tokenization of everything. And basically, the BlackRock

51:34.670 --> 51:39.190
wants to tokenize everything that the real estate, the mortgages, the treasuries, even

51:39.190 --> 51:43.810
carbon credits. And of course, you know, they always frame it as innovation and convenience

51:43.810 --> 51:48.330
and all these things, right? So I was wondering where you see this going? Is this like a much

51:48.330 --> 51:53.270
bigger existential threat than something like, you know, foreign policy or China and Russia?

51:54.070 --> 52:00.710
All this consolidation with BlackRock has been enabled by the debt based economy and the

52:01.690 --> 52:08.850
inflation. I mean, if we had good old fashioned gold standard, these gigantic financial companies

52:08.850 --> 52:16.030
just wouldn't exist. So, you know, they're parasites on the public. And yet it's the

52:16.030 --> 52:22.630
private sector, right? So they're buying up homes all over the place and realizing the dream

52:22.630 --> 52:28.270
of the world economic forum. I don't know. I just think that fiat money is the great

52:28.270 --> 52:34.990
original sin of modern capitalism. And it's kind of corrupting everything.

52:35.970 --> 52:42.250
You mentioned stablecoins earlier. You know, the stablecoins are really nothing other than a method

52:42.250 --> 52:48.250
by which government bonds are going to be able to maintain their credit standing. You know,

52:48.290 --> 52:53.790
it's just another market for T-bills. And that's all it is. So if you can shift over

52:53.790 --> 53:02.230
the money, transmit or transmittal services over to companies that are invested with trillions

53:02.230 --> 53:08.050
and trillions and trillions of dollars in T-bills, then you've created another market for your debt

53:08.050 --> 53:14.010
and enable more government spending and more power. So there's just like no getting off this

53:14.010 --> 53:19.750
thing. From an individual point of view, I mean, you've mentioned several private

53:19.750 --> 53:24.730
coins that are really great. And I have friends of mine that live off these things and they do

53:24.730 --> 53:28.690
very well. I'm not that technologically sophisticated. Oh, I got to tell you,

53:29.450 --> 53:36.130
you know, I used to go travel the world speaking about Bitcoin. But after the thing just became

53:36.730 --> 53:41.330
unusable and kind of corrupt, I just kind of lost interest in it. And then I've turned down

53:41.790 --> 53:47.090
every single invitation for me to speak up about Bitcoin for about the last eight or nine

53:47.090 --> 53:51.290
years because for seven or eight years, because I don't have anything to say.

53:51.850 --> 53:55.870
You know, what am I going to stand up in front of you and say buy Bitcoin, hold it and then just

53:55.870 --> 54:00.730
get rich? I mean, what else is there to say? I don't even understand what goes on at these

54:00.730 --> 54:06.570
Bitcoin conferences. Like what's anybody even talking about besides, you know, the goofy

54:07.390 --> 54:11.810
plans to put luxury cars on the blockchain or, you know, here's my new sunglasses on the

54:11.810 --> 54:18.210
blockchain. You know, beyond that, beyond this stupid gizmos like that, what actually is there

54:18.210 --> 54:22.910
left to say about this? Because if I stopped writing about it, if I stopped speaking about it,

54:22.950 --> 54:29.290
because it just became like a grift in a way. And it just disgusts me.

54:29.410 --> 54:33.490
Yeah. No, I mean, that's, I think that's called integrity and good for you for doing that. And,

54:33.670 --> 54:37.590
you know, it was exactly what you mentioned. I mean, it was almost like a TP USA event.

54:37.590 --> 54:42.430
I mean, there was like big, very overly dramatic stage presence. And I mean, yeah, it was,

54:42.570 --> 54:48.750
it was kind of silly. It was fun in some ways just because people had the enthusiasm and the

54:48.750 --> 54:53.330
excitement and you could feel it in the air, but nothing of substance. Yeah. I mean, there was no

54:53.330 --> 54:57.530
talk about privacy coins, how we, you know, decentralized, none of that stuff, you know.

54:57.610 --> 54:59.970
It certainly was a stranger in a foreign land.

55:00.870 --> 55:04.910
Yeah, I used to give these big lectures. I've traveled the world giving lectures about

55:04.910 --> 55:11.030
the history of money and the place of Bitcoin within it and giving complicated lectures about

55:12.330 --> 55:16.670
reserve requirements for banks and the stability and stability within the free banking systems

55:16.670 --> 55:21.030
and all these things. And none of that's interesting to anybody anymore, you know,

55:21.110 --> 55:24.930
because it's not really about the ideas. And it's certainly not about ideals.

55:25.610 --> 55:28.450
You know, God bless Roger Ver, he's kept his principles all this time.

55:28.450 --> 55:37.990
And, you know, and, you know, Interpol went after him and arrested him and threatened to

55:37.990 --> 55:46.010
deport the guy, you know, or bring him to the US. And he threw a lot of hard work, got out of it.

55:46.730 --> 55:51.230
He probably, if Camel had won, he definitely would be in jail today. So, you know, there's

55:51.230 --> 55:56.170
certain things that Trump administration has done good, you know, getting Ross out of prison

55:56.170 --> 56:01.190
and so on. But I just said Mario Roger, because, you know, he could have gone along with the

56:01.190 --> 56:05.450
racket and he just didn't. It's just like, there's something in him that just cannot be

56:06.310 --> 56:11.550
just will not go there. You know, he just he believes strongly in liberty and

56:12.090 --> 56:16.790
was the first principle. I wish there were more people like him, really.

56:17.250 --> 56:20.530
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree, man. That's one great dude right there.

56:20.850 --> 56:21.170
Yeah.

56:21.510 --> 56:25.270
He was supposed to be on a podcast last year, but we got our times mixed up

56:25.270 --> 56:28.430
with Spain and everything else. So it never materialized.

56:28.590 --> 56:29.550
I think he was in Korea, then.

56:30.070 --> 56:31.290
Yeah, he was actually in Korea.

56:31.450 --> 56:32.530
We were all mixed up, I bet.

56:33.290 --> 56:37.230
Yeah, he was in Korea, man. It was the most disgusting thing, but he was

56:37.990 --> 56:41.530
arrested and basically put under house arrest and we're in an ankle break. So I said,

56:41.610 --> 56:44.870
I'll look himself. I mean, the Bitcoin Maxers were just celebrating.

56:45.330 --> 56:49.790
They just thought, oh, I know, man. Max Kaiser was all over that. And he started

56:49.790 --> 56:53.430
and told me about my mother because I was standing up for Roger on the next date.

56:54.950 --> 56:58.730
It's crazy. Yeah. I just don't understand that, man. The dude championed liberty.

56:58.910 --> 57:02.310
There's no reason to attack him for that. Like, this is the guy that's trying to help people

57:02.310 --> 57:06.770
become, you know, self-sufficient and fight against this digital tyranny that he saw coming

57:06.770 --> 57:10.790
so long ago. There's absolutely no hate that should be directed towards that, dude.

57:11.150 --> 57:11.490
Oh, man.

57:11.590 --> 57:12.010
But, uh,

57:12.630 --> 57:18.630
Yeah, what a great man. It inspires me. You know, gentlemen, I've been thinking about

57:18.630 --> 57:29.930
this a lot because I, you know, let's just say 10, certainly 12 years ago, I believe that we were

57:29.930 --> 57:36.810
minting libertarians, you know, by the many dozens every day, right? I traveled the world

57:36.810 --> 57:41.110
for students for liberty, spoke to the students, you know, it's like, there are all these

57:41.110 --> 57:47.510
organizations, all these people I felt like even in 2012 or something, I started a new

57:47.510 --> 57:51.410
company called Liberty.me, which I thought was going to be a new social network for libertarians.

57:52.570 --> 58:01.330
And yeah, it was kind of a stupid idea because I hadn't thought through it very well.

58:01.530 --> 58:09.130
Plus, I wasn't a majority holder of equity in the company. So I was basically in a position

58:09.130 --> 58:13.410
not making any decisions about the company at all, which is something you should never do.

58:13.410 --> 58:17.910
But that's what we do. If you don't have the capital, you get venture capital and then venture

58:17.910 --> 58:21.510
capitalists are running your company until they get sick of it and they sell it, which is essentially

58:21.510 --> 58:27.910
what happened. But the point is that I thought that something great was happening in the world

58:27.910 --> 58:36.950
through our educational work. And then it just, it just all collapsed partially because of

58:38.090 --> 58:41.930
intellectual infantilism. People started learning their libertarians through

58:41.930 --> 58:46.730
libertarianism through memes instead of like books or careful thought or struggle. They were just

58:46.730 --> 58:54.730
joining, I don't know, for to get a good, you know, hook up on weed or chicks or, you know,

58:54.830 --> 59:00.070
whatever. And then as soon as, as soon as the winds changed and the career prospects

59:00.070 --> 59:06.150
changed, you know, they bailed entirely until the COVID period when most libertarians

59:06.150 --> 59:11.890
were entirely for the lockdowns. I mean, reason magazine was celebrating the glory of masks and,

59:11.970 --> 59:17.950
you know, I mean, it was unbelievable what happened. And now we just live among the

59:17.950 --> 59:26.210
rubble. I mean, whatever we thought existed or was developing was so thin and fragile

59:26.210 --> 59:34.050
and unsophisticated and uncourageous that it just fell apart with the slightest change of winds.

59:34.330 --> 59:40.150
And it's, it's a shock to me. So I don't know, I don't know what that implies for the future,

59:40.210 --> 59:44.330
but one of the reasons I started Brownstone Institute is because I wanted to rethink this,

59:44.890 --> 59:50.230
you know, let's take apart the machinery of the state one piece at a time, examine it,

59:50.230 --> 59:56.550
see the best way we can reform it, dismantle it, whatever. What are the methods by which we can

59:56.550 --> 01:00:05.410
achieve? Not some weird ideological vision, but a plain sense of human rights and liberties that

01:00:05.410 --> 01:00:10.750
everybody intuitively has. How do we see that realized in this world to stop this growth

01:00:10.750 --> 01:00:18.570
of the surveillance state, stop the therapeutic poisoning state, stop the systematic depopulation

01:00:18.570 --> 01:00:24.970
efforts that are going to stop the secret governments that are running our lives outside

01:00:24.970 --> 01:00:32.670
of democratic control and see something like a revival of the enlightenment vision of people

01:00:32.670 --> 01:00:38.850
like Thomas Payne or Thomas Jefferson, you know, like, how do we do that? And so my purpose

01:00:38.850 --> 01:00:44.170
of Brownstone was like finally to have an independent think tag that would work through

01:00:44.170 --> 01:00:49.210
these kinds of problems. I realized I could not do that with any of the legacy institutions that

01:00:49.730 --> 01:00:53.770
exist because they're all in the pay of corporate donors that otherwise corrupts filled with

01:00:53.770 --> 01:00:58.830
careerists, whatever, whatever. And it got boring to me. So I don't know,

01:00:59.730 --> 01:01:05.110
rather than just curse the darkness, I decided to invoke a shade light of candle. So that's

01:01:05.110 --> 01:01:08.850
what Brownstone is trying to be. Man, you did a great job with it too. Thank you.

01:01:09.370 --> 01:01:13.130
Hey, free thinkers, this is Matt Agarist, and I'm going to take a quick pause to remind

01:01:13.130 --> 01:01:16.710
you of something really important. First off, apologies for the interruption,

01:01:17.190 --> 01:01:21.330
but if you're still here, that means you're resonating with what we're doing. And we need

01:01:21.330 --> 01:01:26.390
your help to keep it alive. Independent platforms like ours don't survive on corporate sponsorships

01:01:26.390 --> 01:01:31.990
or mainstream media funding. We survive because of you. If you're finding value in these

01:01:31.990 --> 01:01:36.430
unfiltered conversations and real solutions, the best way to support us is by liking,

01:01:36.710 --> 01:01:40.350
subscribing, and sharing this podcast with your friends and fellow free thinkers.

01:01:40.990 --> 01:01:44.790
It's a small act, but it's a powerful one. It helps us break through the censorship

01:01:44.790 --> 01:01:51.230
and algorithms designed to silence voices like ours. This isn't just about supporting a podcast.

01:01:51.790 --> 01:01:55.750
It's about standing for freedom, exposing corruption, and building a movement that

01:01:55.750 --> 01:02:00.730
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01:02:00.730 --> 01:02:05.350
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01:02:05.350 --> 01:02:10.270
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01:02:10.510 --> 01:02:13.790
you'll be directly supporting our mission and helping us to stay independent.

01:02:14.570 --> 01:02:17.270
Your support is what keeps this platform alive and fighting.

01:02:17.910 --> 01:02:23.010
So thank you for being part of this journey, for sharing these ideas and for standing with us.

01:02:23.810 --> 01:02:28.170
We're at the end of the show here, but like we always, I don't know if you know

01:02:28.170 --> 01:02:31.370
that or not, but the Free Thought Project podcast always likes to end on a positive note,

01:02:31.370 --> 01:02:34.930
because sometimes these conversations can get a little dark. So before I get to that,

01:02:34.930 --> 01:02:38.490
man, I want to thank you for coming on. Man, you've been a huge influence.

01:02:38.650 --> 01:02:41.270
I know Jason told you that earlier, but you've been a huge influence in my life,

01:02:41.350 --> 01:02:46.130
you know, honestly, like since even before Jason, I saw you speak at Libertopia back in 2014.

01:02:46.450 --> 01:02:48.970
It was exciting that we got invited to that and we got, we were like,

01:02:49.030 --> 01:02:52.290
oh, Jeffrey Tuck is here. It was cool. So that's great. That's very sweet.

01:02:52.650 --> 01:02:56.690
Well, I tell you what, we're fighting every day and I will say this,

01:02:57.370 --> 01:03:07.170
I have never been under attack. Now that I've ever been in my life, then I am right now.

01:03:07.530 --> 01:03:12.970
I am trolled. I'm followed from restaurant to restaurant from bar to bar. Just this last

01:03:12.970 --> 01:03:19.170
week when I was at children's health defense conference with a booth and a couple of undercover

01:03:19.170 --> 01:03:28.790
journalists, you know, were tricking. Yeah. And so this is going on all the time. And

01:03:28.790 --> 01:03:35.570
all that tells me, I mean, what's this stuff? Like if, if what we're doing were not effective,

01:03:36.050 --> 01:03:43.490
they wouldn't bother. So to me, I look at this and go, well, you know, we're over the target,

01:03:43.490 --> 01:03:48.790
you know, we're doing the right thing. We're, we're taking on the real enemies.

01:03:49.430 --> 01:03:52.670
If we weren't being effective, they would leave us alone. But why would they even care?

01:03:52.950 --> 01:03:57.550
I mean, a political ran a wicked attack on me the other day. And right now Kaiser Health News

01:03:57.550 --> 01:04:02.710
is preparing another one. New York Times, you know, I sat for a two hour interview with New

01:04:02.710 --> 01:04:06.570
York Times reports. I'm like, very nice lady, but you know, probably when some of the article

01:04:06.570 --> 01:04:12.250
comes out, it's going to be a wicked attack. I don't know. But I feel like I'm in a weird

01:04:12.250 --> 01:04:19.930
way, you know, the collapse of that old, old libertarian movement that we imagine ourselves

01:04:19.930 --> 01:04:29.990
to be part of has made room for some really highly effective, targeted efforts to dismantle power

01:04:29.990 --> 01:04:36.270
and, and protect liberty and, and make it possible for something new to emerge on the other side

01:04:36.270 --> 01:04:43.870
of this. I didn't mean to sound depressing. I'm actually, in a strange way, more optimistic now

01:04:44.650 --> 01:04:50.730
than I ever have been, because I now see the practical means by which we can actually make

01:04:51.290 --> 01:04:56.410
genuine progress, not create utopia, but make genuine progress.

01:04:57.210 --> 01:05:01.070
Yeah, for sure. And I think the Brownstone Institute is a huge part of that, man. It's a,

01:05:01.630 --> 01:05:05.750
it was very well needed, especially during the COVID times, you know, like there was so much

01:05:05.750 --> 01:05:10.150
wild, crazy stuff out there on the internet. People thought that the Kim Trails were magnetizing

01:05:10.150 --> 01:05:13.710
their brains so that hammers could stick to their heads. I mean, it was some crazy stuff, man.

01:05:14.350 --> 01:05:15.770
Yeah. Are you being that type of?

01:05:20.310 --> 01:05:27.030
But I mean, and now like, as you document in that article, like it's changed, you know,

01:05:27.070 --> 01:05:31.510
people are now running like well funded hoaxes to manufacture this, like these studies to

01:05:31.510 --> 01:05:36.150
try to smear their opponents. And I'm very glad it was you that they came up to and were able to,

01:05:36.150 --> 01:05:40.350
you know, they just got thwarted in their, in their tracks. But anyway, man, we've covered a lot

01:05:40.350 --> 01:05:44.310
of ground today, you know, like a whole bunch of ground. And not all of it was like doom and

01:05:44.310 --> 01:05:49.250
gloom, you know, but what, you know, we always like to try to concentrate on solutions here.

01:05:49.330 --> 01:05:53.850
So for our final question here, it's a white pill. If you had a magic wand,

01:05:53.970 --> 01:05:58.430
obviously the Brownstone Institute is a piece of this, but like we're going to speak

01:05:58.430 --> 01:06:03.550
theoretically here. If you had a magic wand and could wave it right now to fix like the root

01:06:03.550 --> 01:06:07.990
cause of all these things that we've talked about today, like the status mindset, this mindset,

01:06:08.510 --> 01:06:13.850
this economic insanity, this war on truth. What would it look like? And what would that solution

01:06:13.850 --> 01:06:17.710
actually be? Well, you know what I'm going to say. I mean, it's the same thing everybody

01:06:17.710 --> 01:06:22.630
would say. I mean, we got to unplug the money machine. Like if we just get rid of the Fed,

01:06:23.230 --> 01:06:30.610
we'd bring back health, thrift, prosperity, some degree of economic rationality,

01:06:33.230 --> 01:06:38.210
independence, limited government, the budget would be balanced. I mean, that one solution

01:06:38.210 --> 01:06:45.210
of just eliminating the fiat money machine at the Federal Reserve would be the single

01:06:45.890 --> 01:06:49.870
solution, I think that would fix more than anything else. And I don't know how that happens,

01:06:50.430 --> 01:06:57.610
but I love just saying it over and over again in the Fed. Ron Paul's been chanting it for decades,

01:06:57.790 --> 01:07:02.570
man. And it's so true. We need more Thomas Massies, more Rand Paul's, more Ron Paul's,

01:07:02.570 --> 01:07:07.330
you know, more Justin Amash's. I mean, Trump even said he was going to audit the Fed,

01:07:07.470 --> 01:07:11.890
but that quickly went to the waste. Oh yeah, I remember that. Man, Jeffrey,

01:07:12.150 --> 01:07:16.230
thank you so much for coming on today, man. And before we finally turn it off here,

01:07:16.230 --> 01:07:20.990
obviously, thebrownstoneinstitute.org is the website, but where else can people

01:07:20.990 --> 01:07:26.430
find your work and support it? Yeah, I don't know if you know this, but I write,

01:07:26.550 --> 01:07:34.070
well, six days a week I write for E-POP Times, which is the fourth largest newspaper in the U.S.,

01:07:34.070 --> 01:07:37.270
almost the third. It's actually the largest circulation in the last

01:07:37.270 --> 01:07:44.570
half of this time. So they've given me a daily column, which is something I never imagined

01:07:44.570 --> 01:07:51.010
in my life that I would ever have. And they also have a physical newspaper that comes out weekly.

01:07:51.610 --> 01:07:59.710
So I think it's strange. Our passions emerge in unexpected places when they called me up

01:07:59.710 --> 01:08:05.030
and said, we won't give you a daily column. Well, I don't know. I can't think of anybody

01:08:05.510 --> 01:08:14.150
who would give me a daily column. So yeah, great. So yeah, so if you want to read my

01:08:15.010 --> 01:08:18.650
writings on every subject you can possibly ever imagine, you can go there.

01:08:19.090 --> 01:08:23.490
Yeah, I've read multiple of them. I liked it whenever. That was like three or four years ago,

01:08:23.650 --> 01:08:25.570
right? That you had since you've been there?

01:08:26.350 --> 01:08:29.630
Yeah, yeah. I've been there for, I guess, three years, something like that.

01:08:30.090 --> 01:08:36.150
They haven't fired me yet, which is incredible. We'll put those links below the podcast description.

01:08:36.390 --> 01:08:39.830
Jeffrey, thank you so much for coming on today, man. This has been a great conversation.

01:08:40.870 --> 01:08:43.630
Thank you, Mr. Tucker. My pleasure. Thank you so much, guys.

01:08:49.330 --> 01:08:55.360
Thank you for listening to the Free Thought Project podcast. And please don't forget to

01:08:55.360 --> 01:09:02.480
rate, review and subscribe. Free minds, free people.