 It's good to see you. We'll be starting soon. People are coming in, getting a seat, talking to one another. We'll start in a minute. Whenever you want to start, we can start. If you could press on camera on this one. I'll probably do it before I go up, so we're fine. What happened to these? There's another stack here disappeared. You're putting it over there? Let me know when I turn it off. Is there anybody who doesn't speak Polish? I don't count. I think it's the half of 2015. Nice event. I'm happy to see you because I'm happy to see you. Welcome. Thank you, Tomek. Thank you all for being here. Yes, I missed the days where we could get hundreds of people in Warsaw to come to one of our lectures. I'm counting on you guys to resurrect that. Next time I come, we'll be back to hundreds of people. We're talking lately about these lectures and talks, and we sit here in Poland and it's fairly comfortable. But one of the things that really is becoming evident, and if you follow what's going on and you're tuned to what's going on in the world, or what's going on really not far from where we sit, is we're getting a real illustration in real time of the real brutality of war. War war is really about just the devastation, the number of people who get killed, the amount of lives that are just being wasted, the total destruction that war involves. What is going on right now as we sit here, again fairly comfortably, what is going on right now in some way, like Bakmurtz where thousands and thousands of soldiers, both on the Ukraine side and the Russian side, have really already been slaughtered. Thousands and thousands are going to still die, probably in the fields of eastern Ukraine, in little towns, in little villages, the number of lives, families destroyed, not to mention the wealth and economic activity and future that now doesn't exist for so many people. I think for Europeans, for Western Europeans, this is somewhat of a shock. I mean, my generation, your generation even, right? This is the first. We really haven't seen anything like it, maybe some in the Balkans with the breakup of Yugoslavia and kind of the balkanization of that area and the wars that happened there, but nothing on the scale of what we're seeing now in terms of destruction and death and just complete devastation. I come from a region where this has been experienced in more recent memory, that is, I grew up in Israel, so I grew up living through wars in a very small country where the devastation maybe was not quite as bad as Ukraine, but maybe as a percentage of the population, maybe very close to what is going on in Ukraine. And the one thing you learn is there's no upside to all. There's nothing good that comes out of it. It is not even a zero-sum game. It's not zero-sum. What is it? It's negative sum. It's a huge negative sum. And it's not that one party, particularly in this war, it's not that one party gains and another party loses. It's true, and really in every war it's true, that it is a lose-lose activity. It is a lose-lose situation and it's on a scale that is hard to imagine. What is maybe interesting for us is how unusual war is for our generation. Because one thing that's important to remember and shocking, in a sense, is this was kind of standard policy in Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years. The brutality, the lose-lose, the death, the destruction, the devastation. I mean, 30-year wars, 100-year wars, little wars in between, little wars after, little wars before. Europeans have been slaughtering each other forever. And indeed, human beings have been slaughtering each other pretty much forever. This is not a new phenomena. Indeed, what is it that's new? What is it that's different? The lack of war is different. The lack of war is new. And I think we entered a period where we expected the lack of war to continue forever. And one of the things that this war is maybe teaching us is that we cannot take peace for granted. We cannot take the foundations of peace for granted. That peace, just like freedom and liberty, are things that have to be fought for on a regular basis. And to understand what it is to fight for peace, we need to understand what it is that brings us war. And what it is when we fight for peace, what it is that we must fight for. So we live in a time, obviously of great turbulence, we live in a time where we have just gone through, I think, two periods. The period from the Napoleonic War until World War I and the period from World War II to today, where for much of the world, these were incredibly peaceful periods, maybe the most peaceful periods in all of human history. And this is part of why I think what's going on in Ukraine right now is so shocking, is so surprising, is because we haven't seen anything like it since World War II, and even then we thought World War I or World War II were aberration because we had lived through about 80 years of peace before World War I. So we have to ask the real question of why are we seeing war back on our doorstep? Why is this phenomena come back to haunt Europe or to haunt really the world? And I think to understand that, we need to think about, let's see, at least in human history, what is it that brought about the peace of those 80 years in the 19th century and kind of the 70 years since World War II? What generated those peaceful periods and maybe we can learn something from that that relates to the causes of this war and the causes of war more generally? So what is it that made the 19th century unique and made the 19th century an era of relative peace? 19th century. Before nuclear bombs. Well before nuclear bombs. Well, partially prosperity. And why is prosperity something that would lead one towards more peace? Money doesn't like war. There's a lot to lose, right? There's a lot to lose from what we're seeing that again today. Everybody is a loser and when you're making money and when there's prosperity and the economy is doing well, then war is an impediment to that continuing. So prosperity, what else? What else would lead people in the 19th century? It's true the 19th century is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Early in the 19th century you're seeing increased in prosperity, increased in wealth creation, human beings are better off. So yeah, there's more to lose in a sense by going to war. What else would lead the 19th century to be a more peaceful period? Relative freedom in the western world, the area where I think we're talking about when we talk about peace during the 19th century. Relative freedom in a sense of individual freedom. And what does individual freedom mean? Now individuals do what? What do they care about now? They care about themselves. They care about their life. So if you think about history, most of history individuals were taught, we were all taught that we were just parts of members of a tribe, members of a gang, members of a country, members of a religion. But in most of history nobody cared about us as individuals and we were taught not to care about ourselves. What's unique about the 19th century is that it's a period coming out of the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment is an era where we are taught, where our philosophers, our intellectuals, our educators, our public intellectuals are teaching us that what is important is the individual. The individual is our value. And indeed we've now created a political system that values for the first time really in human history or maybe with a small exception of Greece. For the first time in human history we have political systems that value the individual. They leave the individual free. They actually discuss the fact that individuals are free. And why are individuals, why is freedom for individuals a feature of the 19th century? What other ideas made it possible for us to come up with the notion that individuals should be left free, that individuals and themselves, that individuals are a real value? I think the rule of law is a consequence, something even before the rule of law, more basic to human nature, what's that? The validity of reason. So yes, I mean I think the great achievement of the Enlightenment is this idea that reason is a means of knowledge. We don't gain knowledge from revelation, we don't gain knowledge from some specialist, from philosopher kings. Reason is a means of knowledge and every individual has the capacity to reason. Every individual can think for himself. And as a consequence, every individual can take care of himself, every individual can make choices for himself. Right, I mean before the Enlightenment, what was your profession? What profession did you engage in? Carpentry, why did you engage in carpentry? Because you liked it? Because your father was a carpenter. And you had to join a guild to follow your father. You had very little choices in the 19th century. Oh sorry, before the Enlightenment. You know why, I mean this is a story I've told, I don't know if you guys have heard this story, but you know why Leonardo da Vinci did not follow his father into being a notary and instead became the Renaissance that he was, Renaissance man that he was, Leonardo da Vinci was a painter and a sculptor and an engineer and a strategist and an advisor to kings and so on. How did he get to do all these fun things when everybody in that period of time was born and had to do what their father did? They had to join the guild. What was special about Leonardo da Vinci that the political and cultural system allowed him to become a Renaissance man? Yeah, he was a bastard. He was not allowed to join the guild. He was not allowed to join the guild because he was born out of marriage. So because he was born out of the system, the system couldn't impose its will on him. Indeed the reason he was freer than most people is because he was an illegitimate child. And we are all lucky that his father had some affairs on the side and had some illegitimate children because life would be a lot duller without Leonardo da Vinci, people like that in the world. So what we discover in the Enlightenment is the efficacy of human reason and therefore the ability of the individuals to take care of themselves and make choices for themselves is not just we didn't choose our profession before the Enlightenment. What else did we choose? We didn't choose who to marry. We didn't choose our political leaders. We had very few choices. But suddenly the idea that we all have the capacity to think for ourselves, we all can reason, liberated all of us. And suddenly individual freedom became important. And people who care about themselves, people who are free, people who are individuals and living individuals free, what is the goal of it, as expressed at least in the, let's say the Declaration of Independence of the American Declaration of Independence, what's the goal of all this freedom? Why be free? What's the purpose of it? Yeah, human flourishing or in the words of the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness. So if you're in a system that's leaving you basically free, you have the capacity to think for yourself. You have now, because you know you have this capacity, you have maybe a little bit of self-esteem, you're pursuing your happiness, you're trying to flourish. War, the destruction, the devastation, the murder is the last thing on your mind. You're not interested. And if you're pursuing your happiness and somebody calls you to arms in the name of the tribe, leave me alone. I don't want to have anything to do with this. My life, my happiness, I'm not going to the bloody fields of warfare and dying on the field for what? For what cause? Explain it to me, right? Reason. We want explanations. Give me an explanation of why I should die for this cause. What am I fighting for? Yeah, but who cares? I have land, you have land. We've discovered the concept of private property, right? We've implemented it politically to some extent in Europe, to some extent in the 19th century. Why fight? For what? For some mystical belief that I don't really hold anymore? So the error of peace is when we reject the mysticism and embrace reason. The error of peace is an error we reject, collectivism and tribalism of all its forms and embrace individualism. It's not an accident that the 19th century is a relatively peaceful period because it is a period of relative individualism and a period of embracing reason and a period of pursuit of happiness. I mean, the whole culture, particularly of Europe and the United States, the whole culture was a culture of celebration, the celebration of freedom, the celebration of individualism, you see it in the art, you see it in the literature, you see it in the music. It's a celebration of life. It's human beings, in a sense, reborn after centuries of slaughter and mayhem, centuries of the causes of slaughter and mayhem, which are basically two, which is what the Enlightenment undoes, mysticism and collectivism. Every war out there, ultimately, can we leave them to the end and I promise to answer all questions? Every war, ultimately, has been motivated, justified, explained in terms of either a mystical cause or a collectivist cause, or usually both. Usually it's God's war. I mean, how many Europeans were slaughtered over whether you were Protestant or Catholic or whether what type of Protestant you were in some kind of holy war, how many Muslims killed Christians and Christians killed Muslims in the name of holy wars, you know, generated by some mystical entity that inspired us to go out and slaughter the people who didn't uphold the same mystical views that we did and how many of them were motivated by, you know, we are the superior tribe, we are the superior being and of course that always goes together with the world that views what? Economics as what? Zero sum. So the only way to grow economically is how? To steal. So if you believe in zero sum, the only way to grow is to steal. And, you know, in much of human history, because of oppression, because of authoritarianism, much of the economics was zero sum. So mysticism, collectivism and that perspective of zero sum, I would say are the three causes of war. They're the causes of, I think World War I, I think they're the causes, you know, it's kind of obvious that the causes of World War II. I mean, the Nazis had a clear mystical agenda. They had a clear collectivistic agenda. And they viewed the world as a zero sum world where, you know, the German people needed more resources to take on more of those, more of their needs. They needed to conquer their lands rather than what's a non-zero sum way of growing an economy? Trade. Production and trade, right? Trading with other countries, producing and trading with other countries. That's a win-win that everybody grows. In the period after World War II, I think to some extent we returned at some level to the idea of a trade. Trade was formalized as a good thing. A lot of the agenda of the United States and the West was this idea of free trade. Trade is win-win. And then when the Berlin Wall came down, integrating former communist countries into this idea of trade, I think the real positive of the European Union, many positives, but the one positive of the European Union is this idea of free movement of labor, capital, and goods. That is free trade is a good thing. It's a recognition of that. So there's a recognition in the West post-World War II that the world is not a zero sum game. There is a respect at some level for individualism, implicit, not so much explicit but implicit in the way we live our lives, we organize our societies. As critical we are of the world, as pretty good friend you would have who you would marry, still is in the West. And reason is still respected, not as much as some of us would like, but it's still respected. We like science, we like technology. We acknowledge the importance of the human mind and for the most part again, not as consistently as we would like, we leave individuals free to think for themselves, and live for themselves. And the pursuit of happiness has not completely gone out the window as much as we love to be super pessimistic among those of us who are objectivists or freedom lovers of various varieties. So what brings us peace again is reason what's going on in Russia. Well, I think what happened in Russia is we have a public intellectuals and spokesmen who clearly do not believe in any one of these three elements that bring about peace. Indeed, feel threatened by all of them. Does Putin or Dugan or any of the intellectuals in Russia care about reason? Do they ever talk about reason? Is there any semblance of respect for the human mind in Russian philosophy today, in Russian thinking, in Russian ideology? No. And maybe you could argue there never has been. Maybe that's why Russia was so susceptible to a Bolshevik revolution. Maybe that's why Russia was so susceptible to communism. Communism is a form, I would argue, of a mystical belief of the negation of reason, even though it's called scientific. It is negation of science, certainly the science of man. It's a negation of human nature. It's a negation of the principles of economics. It's a negation of reality. And a mystical belief in some proletarian that we're all supposed to sacrifice for and who rules over us through a dictator. I mean, you have to be pretty screwed up to believe in that stuff, particularly as implemented in the Soviet Union, as brutal as it was in the Soviet Union. So there's something mystical in the culture of Russia that manifested itself in communism and even though communism supposedly was atheist, was secular, was anti-religion, that religion never left that culture. The mysticism never left that culture because I think communism feeds off of that mysticism, feeds off of a religious sensibility, a religious sense. So when the Berlin Wall came down when the Soviet Union broke up, the mysticism of Russian culture sustained itself. And you can see by the kind of spokesman, by the kind of rhetoric that comes out from the intellectuals in Russia, the extent to which they are still mystics. They believe in the spirit of the Russian people. They are devoutly, many of them, at least at the leadership position, whether they're just spouting this because they needed an order to sustain power or whether they really believe it doesn't really matter. But they claim to be Russian Orthodox and committed to that Russian Orthodoxy and that that is what makes them special and unique. They use religion to justify many of their political programs, much of their opposition to so-called, what they view as Western decadence, those are mystical traditions and a cultural mysticism, a belief in some kind of... You can hear this in every Putin talk. There's something about this... Some Russian spirit that hovers above Russia that is destined for greatness, destined for empire, destined to be meaningful. And every autocrat, every war that we've seen in human history always had a tinge of that. A tinge of that mystical destiny that has been bestowed on you, the people, whether it's bestowed on, again, particular religions or whether it's bestowed on particular individual leaders or whether it's bestowed on particular peoples. So they have the mysticism, they have the mysticism in space and again Putin's talks are filled with that kind of mystical explanations for what he's doing. They reject reason, they embrace mysticism. Is Russian culture today really again, maybe forever, is Russian culture a culture that embraces individualism? No. I mean, there are many Russians that embrace individualism and they've all ran away, or at least many of them have gotten away. I was just in Tbilisi and a lot of them there. But Russian culture does not embrace the rights of individuals. It doesn't embrace individual, liberty, individual freedom, individual expression. And as a consequence, they've allowed Putin over the last 20 years whatever freedoms they gained once the Soviet Union was broken up, whatever the freedoms they gained during a short period of time of limited freedom, Putin has crushed, taken away freedom of expression, taken away many of the individualistic freedoms that people had just a tiny little bit of taste of during maybe the 90s and early 2000s. Russia has become more and more and more authoritarian. Russia has become more and more and more collectivist. Again, that collectivism that goes way back has been embraced again. They've embraced the tradition of Russian collectivism. So we have here a culture that's mystical. It's collectivist. And finally, we talked about this idea of zero sum. And I definitely think from an economic perspective, Putin's whole approach and Russia's whole approach to economics is one of ultimately zero sum. Russia has not embraced a market economy. It has not embraced the idea of trade. What has been the entire focus of the Russian economy over the last 20, 30 years? Resources. Single-minded resources. In a sense, Putin has done everything he can to destroy every other aspect of the Russian economy that could have produced innovation and progress and growth partially because... Why suppress those? Partially because they require individualism. They require liberty. They require freedom. So you suppress them all in the favor of one thing which is natural resources. The closest we have to zero sum economy is a natural resource economy. You take it out of the ground, you burn it, it's gone. Now, that's not zero sum because you have to refine it and indeed there's enormous value to that natural resource for people who know how to use them. But it's the closest we have. And indeed one could argue that much of his emphasis on southern Ukraine not only on the Russian speakers of southern Ukraine but what else does southern Ukraine have? Resources. Southern Ukraine is where Ukraine has a lot of natural gas. That area in the Black Sea probably has natural gas under the water. There are other many natural resources that Russia has and have focused on the southeastern region of Ukraine focused on the southeastern region of Ukraine. It's all, you know, from an economic perspective all the thinking is natural resources and when you think about natural resources how do we grow an economy? Well, we need more natural resources. And if growing economy means we need more natural resources then we need to go get more natural resources and the way to get more natural resources is to conquer them. It's to take them. It's to steal them. So all three elements exist in this war. All three elements exist today in Russia. Mysticism, this idea that Putin expresses constantly of a Russian destiny, of a Russian spirit, of a Russian peoples, of the longing for empire, of a destiny that the Russian people are somehow superior to everybody else and are, you know, born to rule and born to have an empire. And I think, again, whether he believes it or not the fact that he has to use that messaging suggests somebody believes it, somebody buys into it and I think it's very much part of the spirit of Russia. The collectivism, it's all about the state, it's all about Russia. I mean, you know, we really haven't seen a disregard for individual human life in warfare like we're seeing right now really since World War I and World War II. Just, you know, what's going on right now is just, it's like the trench warfare. It's hundreds of, you know, just sending people to their deaths inch by inch by inch by inch. I mean, there's no concept of, you know, fighting a modern war, using modern weapons. This is just getting a bunch of kids off the street, training them in how to shoot a gun, how to build trenches or whatever and then sending them into battle. And the whole strategy of Putin seems to be in the East just amassed as many people as you can. In a sense, there's no strategy. Suddenly not a modern strategy. I mean, some of the behavior of the Russian army is truly bewildering, what we know about war in a modern era. It's like the last 50, 60 years don't exist and all they remember is how they fought World War II. A war in which Russian army lost 27 million people. They might have killed five or six million Nazi troops, but they lost 27 million people. So what? It's just individuals. The Russian people survived and they still celebrate that as a great victory. We can talk about whether how much of that was a real victory or not, or who actually won that war. Russia takes way too much credit for World War II, much more credit than they actually deserve. And then, of course, the natural resource economy, a zero-sum world. I think this is what drives Russia. This is what drives Russians. This is why Putin continues to have support because they all believe in this nonsense. I think the other element that is crucial here that explains what happened and why it's happened is Western weakness. That is, those of us in the West, or the countries that represent the West, particularly in Europe, in the United States, the principles in which made the West great, the principles in which made the West strong have been slowly in decay, decade after decade after decade. The respect for reason, the respect for individualism, the respect for capitalism, freedom, free markets have slowly been eroding. Indeed, mysticism is rising in the West in all kinds of forms, not necessarily in the form of religion, but in the form of negating reason and embracing all kinds of ideologies from on the left you're seeing in critical race theory all the way to the right with the rebirth of kind of nationalism, a new form of nationalism which is resurrecting forms of ancient mysticism. So the West is abandoning the ideas that made the West great. And I think people like Putin and people like Xi can see that. They see it as a weakness. They see the deterioration. They see the infighting. In America today, it's clear to me that in America today, Democrats and Republicans, at least at the edges, hate each other more than they hate enemies of the United States. Indeed, they view each other as the primary enemy of the United States. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the wonderful congresswoman from Georgia, no one who believes in Jewish space lasers that do all kinds of weird things. She just announced, she just tweeted a week ago that the United States needs a national divorce. We need to separate. We need to have blue states and red states and separate it out. An interesting concept that we can talk about if you're interested. But this is kind of the attitude today. There's no America. There's blue states and red states. There are blue people, red people. We can't get along. Everything's fragmented. Everything is in decline. Everything is broken. There is no unity. And that is the perspective, I think, of many people of Europe in fighting. Don't agree on anything. Can't come together. General weakness. And of course, in the context of war, Putin kind of tested us, right? He in 2008 invaded Georgia and nobody did anything. I mean, Bush made some noises that prevented Putin probably from going to Tbilisi, but he captured a piece of land and he said, okay, I tested. Nothing really bad happened to me. This is good. In 2014, he took Crimea, tested the water a little bit. Nothing happened. Everybody said, oh, sanctions. We're going to sanction this, sanction that. And then within a few weeks, nobody cared. So I think if you combined his reasoning for going to war with also his idea that the West was weak and wouldn't do anything about it, combined with another delusion that he had, which is that Russia has a strong military and they could win this war quickly, that I think explains why he did it, when he did it, and why to some extent I think now he's stuck because it turns out his military is not powerful. Indeed, it's very weak. It's much weaker than anybody in the West even imagined it would be. It turns out the West is far more united, at least in terms of stopping this particular action, this particular war than he imagined and he's facing much more opposition than he ever imagined from the West, from the Ukraineans. So now he has to double up on all the other aspects, the mystical aspects, the collectivistic aspects, and see if he can find a weakness in the West and see if the West will hold and hope that it doesn't and hope that Ukraine somehow capitulates. At this point I think he's just going to continue this with the hope that somehow something will happen that could lead him to be successful. But there's no reason to believe that will happen, not in the short run anyway. There's no secret that he has there that can somehow lead to victory. And of course he has the nuclear weapon card to secure that nobody's going to come after Moscow. So he can engage in this war without suffering the ultimate consequence to himself. He is not being threatened, at least not from foreign entities, maybe from inside Russia. He's not being threatened because nobody's going to attack Russia itself because of the threat of nuclear weapons. So the roots of war, the roots of war are the same roots that they've always been. Collectivism and mysticism and a zero-sum mentality. The solution to war is the same solution it's always been. Crush the bastards. Defeat them. Then offer better ideas. Off ideas that reject mysticism, collectivism and zero-sum. And those ideas are reason, individualism and basically capitalism. The virtues of trade and the virtues of production. How this all ends is, I just don't know. I'm optimistic for Ukraine because I think Russia's pathetic. I think the Russian army's pathetic. I think Putin. Did you guys see the picture of Putin in church celebrating Orthodox Christmas where he was all alone in the chapel by himself in midnight celebrating Christmas? Look this up online. It'll make your day because it's a great photo. I've never seen a human being that looked so depressed and miserable as Putin looked in that photo. It made me believe again that reality actually works. Bad people suffer the consequences of the evil if not from the external world and inside. The guy looked like everybody, if he loved anybody, he loved to die and his life was about to end. He looked pathetic and it was a little sense of justice. There's a little piece of justice there. Don't say that. Don't say what? I'm not sure I understand. Anyway, he looked pathetic. He looked pathetic and he deserves to be pathetic. I hope that the support that Ukraine has gotten so far continues. I hope Ukraine manages to beat down Putin. But long-term, particularly looking at China and looking at other parts of the world, if we don't get our act together around individualism, around freedom, around liberty, if we don't get our act together around what it is that the West stands for and what the West represents, if the US doesn't get it, it acts together to unify and resurrect somehow the founding principles of the United States, then this is not going to be the last war. Unfortunately, this is going to be the beginning of a long chain of wars because the mystics and the collectivists out there in the world and in here, in the West itself, are on the rise because we are in decline. And as mysticism and collectivism rises, violence and war will rise with them. So this war might be the beginning, but the final and ultimate battle is an ideological battle and it's a battle that all of us need to be engaged in and all of us need to understand and all of us need to be fighting because the future is bleak if the mysticism and collectivism wins even if Russia loses. Thank you. Here, from the education of war, where the European powers discovered they could, instead of fighting at home, they can engage in colonialism, but ultimately these systems fell apart spectacularly to the greatest tragedy of Ottoman history, maybe, with Persians because of war. I'd like to ask a question about the present because right now we have, I think we can deny we have a really great problem. It's mostly going to America, but also here in Poland and generally, by the way, with the people who are considered often libertarians who say they are lovers of freedom, but the other Putin, either openly or they say they don't, but they're part of the Russian propaganda. They can be with Congress, they talk of the media, and why is that? Well, they won the Libertarian Party in the United States, right? So thank you for asking me that question because I was doing my podcast the other day and I was talking about the fact that I'm traveling through Europe, this is, I don't know, fifth stop or something, and people are asking, libertarians and people who love freedom are asking me, what's up with these American libertarians and some libertarian in Europe got on my chat and said, nobody asked that question, nobody cares. So thank you for asking that question. I did not plant, I didn't ask you in advance, right? I also want to comment on the 19th century piece, but let me talk about this for a second. I'll talk about the American libertarians because I think I understand them and know them better, I think. Maybe this applies to European libertarians as well. And then we can also talk about the conservatives because I think conservatives are motivated by slightly different motivations than the libertarians. So the libertarians who are pro-Putin and they are pro-Putin, you're right, some of them pretend they're not, but they're part of the propaganda machine. Most of them are an alcocapitalist, call themselves an alcocapitalist, most of them are anarchists, and most of them come from a tradition, a Rothbardian tradition, of hating the U.S. government, of despising the U.S. government. And indeed, viewing the U.S. government is ultimately the enemy in the world, the most destructive power in the world and therefore, because they view the American government as the enemy, enemy number one, the enemy of their enemy is my friend. So anybody who stands up to America, anybody who shows a little bit of muscle towards America, they respect and they admire and they support. You know, stories are that Rothbard during the Vietnam War used to toast every time an American pilot got shot down, an American pilot. You could be against the war without celebrating when an American dies, and without celebrating the success of communism, right? You can say, I don't think America should be in the war, but communism is evil and I hope that the Vietnamese people, you know, embrace a different system and reject communism. I hope the South beats the North, but that was not the attitude of libertarians, even in the 1960s and 70s. At least a certain part of the libertarian movement. It's their country. They get to decide what kind of regime to have and if they want communism, so be it. We are the bad guys, so every time somebody shoots us, that's cool. And there's a real hatred among libertarians of America and a real hatred particularly focused on what you'd call the American regime, the American system of government. And I think partially because it's a little bit of a repudiation of anarcho-capitalism, because here's a government that, you know, as bad as it is, works pretty well, has worked pretty well, created this amazing, pretty rich, pretty free country over time. It's the two-year rating, but it was good for a long time. So I think that's part of what motivates, you know, there's a nihilistic streak in libertarianism. And I think that nihilism expresses itself in support of Putin. And again, not all libertarians, not all American libertarians, but there certainly is a segment of them. They just, you know, they want to see the world born because they all think that out of it, out of its ashes, there'll be this beautiful anarchy. You know, you can ask me about what I think will be out of the ashes, but I don't think it's anything beautiful. But there really is. I mean, there's a certain celebration of destruction. And you can see it in other positions that they've held over time, not just about war, but other things that are inherently destructive and they support because it's destructive, because they want to see this world destroyed so that they can build the next. So that's, I think, a piece of the libertarian movement. And that might be true in Poland, might not be, I don't know enough, but suddenly it seems to be that the people supporting Putin, which is a little funny, right, or the capitalists who want anarchy support the authoritarian. But it's a hatred of the free countries that represent, you know, that things can actually be okay, even with the government. The conservatives, I think, it's different. The conservatives, and all libertarians that care about this as well, they are paleo-libertarians, which is a concept I never knew could exist. But it turns out that they are paleo-libertarians, paleo-means, meaning that they care about things like traditional values and tradition, and they also care about maybe the color of our skin and our ethnic heritage and things like that. So the conservatives care about the fact, and you see this in Jordan Peterson. He says this, right, Putin represents to them a strong figure, a powerful figure, somebody who doesn't take any nonsense and who stands up, and this is the most important thing to them in the world, stands up to the left. That's all they care about. The American right today is single-mindedly obsessed with the culture war with the left. It's all they care about. And if Putin says bad things about gays, they are ecstatic. They think that's wonderful. Finally, somebody standing up to the whole idea of gay rights, which the Republican Party capitulated over the last 10 years, completely capitulated on gay rights, which is good in my view, but in their view, obviously not good. And woke and all of this stuff, which they think Americans generally are weak on, Putin is strong on. So Putin for them represents true western civilization. He represents tradition and Christianity and manhood and the patriarchy, all the things that these conservatives have embedded in as what it really is to be western. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's a huge, I think a big Putin fan. If you read a little description, she defines herself as a woman in a traditional female role. She's proud of the fact that she has this traditional female role and as a housewife, she's also a politician in Congress, but as a housewife primarily, as a mother, as a Christian, these are the things that define her. And Putin represents all that. And they've loved Putin for a while now. He's got... By holding churches... What's that? By holding churches right between them. But that's always been the case, right? That's always been the case. Religion is always... Religion appears except when we need to kill a bunch of people. It's always the ideal. And why is he bombing? They tell you, excuse, why is he actually doing the Ukraine thing? It's awful. It's because he's fighting western decadence. They believe when he says, I'm fighting western decadence, they go, yes, finally, somebody's fighting western decadence. Sometimes to fight western decadence, you have to blow up some churches. You know? And so when he says denazification, they don't read it quite as Nazis, because I don't know that they can conceptualize what a Nazi really is. They read it as he's fighting the left. And that to them is good enough and that justifies pretty much anything, including divorce in the United States and separating the states out. What was the other thing? The 19th century. Yeah, I'll get to the 19th century in a second. That's the libertarians. So some libertarians, funnily enough, also have this kind of cultural conservatism, which is weird. Like, many of the anarchists in the U.S. are anti-immigration, which, you know, for the U.S., put aside Europe, we can talk about European immigration, but immigration in the United States is not a threat on any level. And yet, here libertarians believe in no state, no state. I assume in a no-state world we can travel and we can go places and we don't need a passport. I assume that's what they believe. But for America today, we need controls on immigration. Nobody can come in. It's ruining our culture. What are you going to do in an alco cap? I don't get it, so maybe I don't understand any caps, but there's this attitude among anarchists today, no immigration, tradition we need. So they are paleo-libertarians, which is a new term for me, but that's how they're being defined. So I think that explains kind of libertarian conservatism. And listen to Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson has a thing where he talks about Putin, and he gets very angry and very passionate and almost he becomes, he turns into this like messianic figure. He's got this, you know, this is what's going to happen to the world, you know, bloodshed and we're going to die if we stand up to Putin. So first of all, it's fear. Putin's going to blow up the world if we shouldn't upset him because he might blow up the world, so we should appease him, which he would never say about any other case. This is Jordan Peterson, you're supposed to be a man, you're supposed to stand up for your values, you're supposed to protect, right? But now when it comes to Putin, Putin we're scared of, right? Putin is actually the representative of western civilization. It's the decadent west that is the enemy, not Putin. You know, and there's a sense in which the decadent west is the enemy, but in a different fight, right now Putin is the enemy. We can tolerate the decadent west for a little while so we can get rid of Putin, then we'll focus on the decadent west and try to improve it. But I think Jordan Peterson is the decadent west, I think he's the problem, not the solution. 19th century, quickly. Suddenly there were some wars in other, you know, empire building and so on. You know, there's a big difference between those empire building wars in World War I and World War II, as you described, those were cataclysmic, but not only we know World War I and World War II because that's what, you know, it's recent history in many respects. But you know, the 30-year war killed more people per capita than World War I or World War II, maybe even combined. If you study the 30-year war, I don't even remember, it's Protestants and Catholics or something like that. You know, you guys slotted each other left and right in Europe and it was unbelievably brutal because it was, you know, it was women and children and villages wiped out and for what? For being of the wrong variation of Christianity. And the 100-year war, I mean the wars in Europe were brutal and at least in Europe, which was, you know, during that period was the area of civilization, but even in the East in, you know, China there were wars, but there were small wars, they wanted wars on any kind of scale like this. You know, this, most of the deaths in India that the empire caused had to do with famines and stuff and less to do with literal wars, it was relatively to human history. Right, and we forget that India was a place with lots of wars before we showed up, before the British showed up, or before anybody else showed up. There were lots of wars in India between Muslims and Hindus and conquests and empires and all kinds of stuff. So the 19th century, if you look at actual bloodshed was a relatively peaceful era and indeed human history certainly since the Enlightenment is a period of declining violence with the exception of World War I and World War II. We've seen a steady decline of violence across the board. There's the book by Stephen Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature which I highly recommend and he shows by every parameter of violence with the exception of, I would say, state violence, but by every state violence for breaking the law, every act of violence, warfare, rape, murder, even stealing, violence has been in decline. Individuals has risen, we value each other more and we're less likely to commit crimes against one another as well as crimes like war. So I do think the 19th century was special and I do think World War I and World War II were caused by this shattering by the resurrection of pre-enlightenment ideas. I think World War I and World War II were the resurrection of collectivistic ideas, the manifestations of nationalism, again a collectivistic ideology, the resurrection of mystical ideas that associate with nations and associate with the land and the state and a rejection and you can see that also in economics, a rejection ultimately of individualism, trade, capitalism, freedom, capitalism and indeed the era from World War I on is an era of declining economic liberties, we know that but I think the whole attitude towards individual freedom has shifted from the late 19th from the early 20th century to today and has been in many realms in decline in some realms it's actually improved the way we treat women, the way we treat minorities in the early 20th century that led to those two wars. Yes For example the war First World War Why did it break out? Because at the time Germany was kind of the China of Europe, it was the cheap manufacturing hub and it needed some kind of trade routes free trade which it strongly advocated for and the reason that the First World War broke out was because the British were blocking the free trade routes so the Germans were actually fighting for freedom of trade and the Second World War was just like a second part of the First World War that has been conducted since World War II shortly after the discovery of the rigid gas fields in the Donbass and the Kharkiv ages. So those wars there were actually about the First World War had something to do with empire and with the fact that Germany was relatively late to empire and it was trying to catch up to France and Britain. Britain was not blocking trade routes Britain was actually ceding ground to the Germans in places like Africa but clearly Germany was lagging and Germany wanted to assert its destiny. Remember this is not long after the unification of Germany which happens in the late 19th century and the beginning of this German destiny mythology, Germany are the chosen people, Germany should have a much bigger world in the world and we need to assert ourselves and not about capital, this is about again the German people the German mythology, the German place in the world, we need to assert ourselves and indeed if you look even empire if you look at empire if you look at the British empire British empire was a massive negative impact on the British economy it was a net capital export capital flow to maintaining the empire was far more had far more expenses than any revenue that flowed into the empire one of the reasons the empire fell apart the British empire fell apart after World War II is because Britain couldn't afford to hold it together anymore that is if the empire was a net beneficiary to England then it would have kept going but it wasn't, it was sucked it was sucking capital out of England to the empire much better for England, looking back would have been to protect free trade routes and to trade with India rather than occupy India, occupation of India cost the British massive quantities of capital and again and indeed if you look at the justification of empire I don't think it was primarily economic it started out economic and then it became something else it became about the white man's burden in Rupert Kipling's terminology World War II was certainly not about capital had nothing to do with capital a tradesman yeah, I mean he grew up in India the reasoning was behind the reasoning was the it was about bringing the rest of the world western civilization it was about it was not primarily about trade and about making money although a lot of bits made money but as a whole but lost money over the empire not made money and I think that's true of every empire as you know those of us who if you understand economics you understand that you gain much more value from trading with people than occupying them and forcing them to do what you want them to do you're going to make a lot more money by trading with them war as we started out war is destructive to everybody everybody loses in war maybe there's some arm manufacturers that make money in war but the only ones who make money in war so World War II is clearly not about trade World War II is clearly about a mystical vision that Hitler believes in and the people around him believe in and they project out and they convince the German people of this mystic vision and they march to their death following this mystical vision so why did they attack Stalingrad which is surrounded by oil? well look no I mean there's often in war you have to have oil to pump into the tanks so one of the goals but the target was not Stalingrad the target was never Stalingrad why was the target in the beginning Poland and France natural resources in particular in Poland and France that the Germans needed so ultimately they need to go to that's why they they wanted the Middle East and they were trying to get to the Middle East in a couple of directions you need the resources in order to in order to put fuel in a tank so you can continue the war the purpose of the war is not the natural resources natural resources you need them in order to keep the war going now I'm not saying natural resources don't have anything to do they have something to do with Russia right now and they have something to do and the idea that the Iraq war is about oil is absurd and ridiculous and I know everybody believes it but it's just complete nonsense nobody, no American oil company landed up benefitting from the Iraq war the first world war the first Iraq war all the oil wells were lit on fire and massive amounts of resources had to be put in to put those fires out put those oil wells ultimately go back to America you see if America wanted the oil then it could have put troops on the ground protected the oil fields let the Iraqis go to hell in Baghdad and the other places protected the oil fields and pumped them out for their needs and American oil companies would have made a fortune instead poor American kids you know were slaughtered in Baghdad and in it was the name of that I forget the place but all of these towns they fought in insurgency they fought all of this and the oil the oil was nationalized by the Iraqi government America did nothing about the fact that it was nationalized by the Iraqi government they didn't stop them from nationalizing it by the Iraqi government and indeed Siri does not like what I'm saying and indeed all production dropped not increased during the period all prices it didn't do good for anything American America net lost lost lost on everything in Iraq and there was nothing about motivation around oil driving that war like Libya was mainly the war in Libya was mainly conducted by Spanish and French troops which Spanish company Repsol is currently draining oil fields I think you have so it's not meant to be an insult you guys have a Marxist view of the world Marx believed that the world is governed by economic processes everything's about the material world everything's about material stuff it's not the world is governed primarily by ideas and by stupid politicians doing stupid things and playing into the hands of different forces I don't know much about the Libyan what instigated this particular Libyan incident but I would say that one of the symbols of Western weakness is that we allowed Muammar Gaddafi to survive as long as he did this is a guy who blew up an airplane over Scotland literally he gave the order to his intelligence agencies who got a bomb it was a Pan Am flight I think it was a Pan Am flight that exploded over Larkaby everybody in use he was at fault and we were too afraid to do anything about it so I think Reagan bombed the tent next to Muammar Gaddafi but wouldn't actually bomb the tent he was in so we let this bastard who clearly had a discotheque in Berlin I think that was blown up that the Americas were in Libya did it nobody did anything to Muammar Gaddafi so the fact that we let him survive as long as he did is a testament to Western weakness not that we finally got rid of the bastard when we did so did somebody benefit from it yes somebody stepped in but that wasn't what motivated what happened the wars in Israel were not motivated by economics and the Vietnam war was not motivated by economics not motivated by economics and what other wars are there you know most of America's stupid wars are motivated by some sense of altruism of helping people out in the world not to take resources from them America doesn't even exploit a fraction of its own resources you're saying that the mission of the American wars let's say third world countries was to liberate those peoples I would say that in particular Iraq was a war I know a lot about because I read everything and I studied it carefully the Iraq war was motivated by a vision of bringing democracy to the Middle East yes they believed it but that's Putin's vision no I'm not justifying the Iraq war it's a wrong vision I don't think that's good right I'm just saying as an economics it was motivated by an idea, a bad idea and I criticized it at the same time you're not going to bring democracy to the Middle East by force but that is the vision that guided the Bush administration the people within the Bush administration it wasn't about oil it was about whether you like it or not it was about democracy and they failed on that and they failed on the oil they failed by every parameter but that's the vision that drove them that really motivated them that was what was in the Pentagon there are massive divisions within the American army devoted to building institutions, building democracy helping the people out huge amounts of resources billions and billions and billions of dollars motivated to create free countries in the places you occupy believe me Russia doesn't have that kind of investment in building democracy in Ukraine they don't even pretend to he doesn't pretend he wants to wipe out Ukrainians Ukraine doesn't exist it was the last speech he gave there is no such thing as Ukraine America has never said something like that they are doing this for the Iraqi people whether you believe them or not that's the verbiage they used and I think they believed it I think Bush believed it I think Cheney believed it I think the New York cons believe it they have other reasons they also believe and I think Putin believes this this is something I didn't talk about they believe that war unites their own country so a big reason why Putin I think invades Ukraine why Putin needs a war is that he needs legitimacy he needs justification for his own existence by killing them by having them die the leadership of Putin's regime wants to boost the ego of Russia of Russia but he's not interested in the ego of Russia yes they'll support him so he knows deep down he is an illegitimate leader and he knows that he is always threatened by a 2014 revolution like was in Kiev there's always the potential that he will be overthrown and what he needs is legitimacy war gives leaders legitimacy it gives a cause to get people rallied around it gives what do they call it a tonic a spirit to the people a pseudo self-esteem a certain pseudo pride in the nation by winning victories and I think the New York conservatives in America and I think Putin certainly believes that he needs a war to hold Russia together and keep them motivated and certainly protect his own regime because he doesn't he thought he would win quickly he thought this would be a crowning achievement he would go down in history as this achieve of empire I don't think Putin cares about natural resources Putin cares about his legacy and his legacy is greater Russia he'll go down in history books as the emperor Putin that's what he wants he cares about that's his psychology he doesn't care about oil he cares about Putin Putin's legacy and in that sense he thought it would be quick and easy and he would achieve his thing and the west would fall apart not support Ukraine Ukrainians would be pathetic so why the timing? why the timing? why the timing? why the timing? some of that is it's an excuse maybe he can use that to motivate some segments of Russian society but I don't think it's a major motivation and why come now? you know he didn't need to do it now don't you military industrial complex in the United States cares in American wars? somewhat but I think it's a small element in perpetuating those wars I don't think it's a big element again I think wars like most human events but particularly important human events are motivated by ideas not motivated by special interests I don't think the military industrial complex is what led to the war in Iraq I don't think the military industrial complex led to any of the modern American wars and participation in the wars I don't think they're the ones not motivating US support for and that's the lack of a respect for individualism a lack of respect for human life which often political leaders exhibit political leaders of authoritarian regimes exhibit more because they don't care about human life that's the essence of authoritarianism but he doesn't bear the cost although he has to fear that he will bear the cost because if they lose their lives so it's not completely cost free there is skin in the game here there really is skin in the game and he has to really be worried I think he is worried I think that's why he's so depressed and so miserable because he's worried he's losing and if he loses he will suffer consequences the powers to be in Moscow won't let him be so yes it's an element but I think it goes to the value of human life which goes to the idea of whether you respect the individual or don't respect the individual and in the United States as the United States respect for the individual individualism is declined Americans are much more likely to sell send their troops into battle for no reason to be slaughtered for no good reason you see that I don't know if you've ever seen what just happened in Afghanistan and you look at the war in Afghanistan and you find me the economic interest that would motivate the sacrifice of young American kids in Afghanistan for nothing zero, zilch to gain the respect of the Afghani people who have no economic value no natural resources nothing, zero there's a good movie called The Outpost about a true story about an outpost of Americans surrounded by Taliban and the way the American government and the American military would need to treat them lead them to the slaughter just allow all these kids to get slaughtered and killed and the politicians and the generals don't give one iota right? there's no natural resource there there's no benefit there all it is is appeasement and a mythology of bringing democracy, turning Afghanistan into a wonderful country for the benefit of whom? not from America, America gains nothing from it and then you leave they thoroughly defeated nobody benefited anything from what they did over there how about the nation that those dictators used to capture their nations, for example Hitler didn't capture them with the termination with the promise of greatness he captured them with the promise of the so called Leibnizheim which is a room to live and the war with Poland but there was no shortage of room to live this is again a zero sum mentality a mentality of the only way to increase your resources is not through production not through innovation not through trade but through occupation and through proving to the world the superiority of your own race and your own being and that was a massive feature of everything Hitler did from the beginning on was the superiority of Germans over everybody else and the fact that they needed a rule they didn't just need land for the Germans but they needed a rule of the people they needed to be elevated above everybody else respecting your points about the American libertarians being blind contrarians you could say in many respects isn't it also reasonable to primarily think about the people who are enslaving you today rather than about people who are also cement their power so if they took the attitude of we don't care we don't care about the Ukraine war we're not taking sides we're just sitting this out our enemy is the United States and I'd say maybe I still think that's cowardly because I'm not asking them to go fight in Ukraine I'm just asking them to say there's a good guy and a bad guy now the good guy is not perfect the good guy is not wonderful the good guy is just good in contrast to the bad guy so all they have to say is Putin is a monster which he is Ukraine was heading towards the west that's its sin that's what Putin couldn't tolerate he was heading towards westernization they're better they're not great, they're not corrupt all the stuff we know but they're better that's all I'm asking them not to send their kids to fight not even to send them money to fight they could even object to the US supplying weapons just make them take them all stand but it's indicative to me the libertarians in the United States Poland I don't know say nothing about what's going on in Iran I don't know if you know what's going on in Iran but what's going on in Iran where young girls are fighting for their freedom for their liberty and the liberty movement says nothing I thought we stood for liberty, individual liberty means wearing what you want for example not having a theocracy and yet the liberty movement is silent on Iran which is mind boggling to me standing up and rejecting oppression so there's something going on that I think is deeper than that and I think is much more about A. not caring about liberty in spite of claiming to be pro-liberty and second a certain hatred of America a certain resentment of America and the enemies Iran I've heard libertarians defend Iran hey, the Iranian people chose to have a theocracy, who are we to challenge that? well, anyway you can't justify authoritarianism if you're supposedly have liberty in the title of your ideology and yet they are so I think it's much more than just I'm worried about the American government I don't want to worry about that, fine but that's not what they're saying they're literally be cut part of as you said part of the propaganda Putin propaganda machine I have a short comment about the Polish liberty movement I would say that in comparison to the American one the Polish one is almost reasonable on most of the cases and there are even with them the Polish one no, the Polish liberty movement so that's good even Polish liberty movement where starting some let's say intellectual debate or even fight for example with the guys from Alabama good for example there is a good friend of mine who published some text about the Putin-Russian invasion in Ukraine and they said we like you but you can write about economics but no, no, no, no do not meddle us with Russian stuff and so on and so forth so I would say that not in terms of political power but in terms of third sector things and so on most of the liberty-oriented people in Poland including most of the self-described Polish libertarians are at least anti-Putin, anti-Russian regime are recognizing that Ukraine is defending itself not the bad Nazis people so there are some discussions and the libertarian guys in America are often surprised why are you thinking the way we are and so on we are closer to the Russian border maybe you're also better it might be that you're better because you're also closer to communism to the memory of communism and authoritarianism so good, I mean I'm not surprised but good and I hope it lasts and I hope it goes beyond Russia I know for you Russia's a big deal because they're right there I think that direction that way but but yes I think we should all be horrified by what is going on in the liberty movement or what they call the liberty movement in the United States because it suggests that maybe it's not about liberty yeah I think we're talking to a born in Israel maybe you could offer a perspective of the second most perfect thing I see in the war Israeli policy there's a guy who is putting who is probably the best reenactment of history in the last decades who started genocide of the invasion his neighbor the Goldstone invasion are not only to conquer territory but by actions in the war Russians are to basically wipe out the Ukrainians as a nation the Lenin himself and yes we see both governments well Israeli weapons I don't think since the war started but maybe before so first let me say all by what the Israeli government is doing with regard to Russia I think it's ridiculous and it's disgusting and it shows immense weakness I also want to just correct one thing the previous government was not a left wing government there is no left wing in Israel they just isn't a left in Israel the left is the left is tiny and they're not left of Netanyahu because Netanyahu sent to right and most of the previous government was sent to right there were some leftist elements most of them were sent to right they just hate each other's guts Israeli politics is more about the personalities than about ideas on every issue most Israeli politicians agree it's on the personalities that they don't agree Israeli politics is a very bizarre stupid thing but I mean particularly politics generally is pretty stupid Israeli politics is particularly you know like Bennett and Netanyahu the previous prime minister and his prime minister don't disagree on almost anything right they're both sent to right people why are they appeasing Putin you know I'll give my explanation I don't know you know I haven't talked to them I'm taking this from the state of the Middle East and from what they say and I think mainly it's Syria and Iran so Russia has established itself as the dominant player in Syria Russia controls the airspace in Syria it has S-400 anti-aircraft batteries and maybe even more maybe even more advanced anti-aircraft batteries in Syria it has an air force base there it has ships in the Mediterranean Russia has real forces in Syria it is basically sided with Assad and trying to they're trying to bolster Assad through that they are in a sense supporting the Iranians because the Iranians are moving in from Iran and they're moving into Syria but Putin has cut a deal with the Israelis and basically the deal is we will let you Israelis do what you want in the airspace over Syria vis-à-vis the Iranians as long as you let us do what we want in the Middle East and now I think as long as you don't supply the Ukrainians with weapons right so Israel's afraid to piss off the the Russians because the Russians are right there they're on the Israeli border with pretty advanced weapon systems now I think it's a massive mistake I don't think Israel has anything to fear from Russia my suspicion is that the Israeli military could wipe out whatever Russian military is in Syria you know it won't be like that but it would be pretty easily given what Ukraine is doing the Israelis could Israel has far more advanced weapon systems than the but that's the fear that they have they're worried that Russia will stop them from controlling the Iranians and right now Israel's priority is Iran well that's a relatively modern that's a relatively recent phenomenon where Iran is supplying Russia with weapons, drones and Russia is supplying Iran with weapons that happened recently and is already starting to be talking Israel now the Israeli public supports Ukraine overwhelmingly but the politicians and I think the military are worried of pissing up the Russians and the Russians supporting the Iranians more and see as long as Iran stays in Iran Israel doesn't have too much of a problem with them because they have anti-missile technology and they can once in a while they disrupt their nuclear stuff so they're not that worried but once the Iranians start coming to the Israeli border which is Syria and Lebanon and giving advanced weapons systems to Hezbollah in Lebanon that's when the Israelis are worried and so that path from Iran into Syria into Lebanon that's what Israel wants to disrupt and right now they rely on the Russians to let them do it without any cost, without any problem without going to war with Russia they're worried that if they support Ukraine, Russia would stop them from taking out the Iranian supply chain and that's what really worries the Israelis the Israelis are terrified by the Iranians so they're willing to sacrifice Ukraine or give up Ukraine for the sake of maintaining their ability to you know bomb the Iranians at will in Syria and once in a while you'll hear I assume you'll hear it in Poland Israel just bombed Damascus right well they're not bombing Damascus randomly they're bombing Iranian facilities within Damascus and the surroundings of Damascus and they don't have to deal with Russian anti-aircraft in order to do that now I think they could deal with Russian anti-aircraft, I think they have technology to do it, they just don't want to get into the situation where they're bombing and killing Russians so call it weak, I do call it pretty pathetic, I do but that's kind of the real politic of it in terms of what the Israeli government is thinking and that's why everybody agrees on it because the priority is Iran and everybody agrees that that's a priority yeah or a civil war ultimately yeah no, I think it's a horrible idea I think it's a defeatist idea I think it's an irrational idea I think it's the end of America and I think I don't think anybody benefits from it and I think it's not practical I don't think it's possible and I don't think a civil war is possible America is far more complicated than red states and blue states I'll give you an example in Texas Texas is a red state we all know Texas is a red state a really red state, solid red Austin Houston Dallas San Antonio 9 of the top 10 metropolitan areas in the Hindus, Pakistan and you swap populations, really is that what we're going to do and then who wants to live in a red state I wouldn't want to live in a red state I think the assumption people are making is red is good blue is bad I wouldn't want to live in a red state you couldn't pay me enough money to live in a red state I'd probably leave America if that was what was going to happen but what's the virtue of Texas without Austin what's the virtue of Texas without Dallas, really I mean we might make fun of blue, CRT and woke and all this stuff but blue also means the symphony orchestra and plays and culture and a lot of the values that make America an interesting place so it's not realistic 45% of Texas is blue and 45 of the most interesting part of Texas is blue the universities the scientists, the entrepreneurs I think everybody's a loser I think the blue states become bluer which is bad for them and the red states become redder and it's bad for them because I think both blue and red are bad but in general but you're not forced you are part of the same organism the reality is that you as an individual if you don't like a blue state you can move to a red state you as an individual if you don't like a red state you can move to a blue state so you have freedom of movement within the country so you're not forced to be participating in blue red you can move states and the reality is 99% of Americans don't move so they seem pretty happy with where they are your actions indicate your actual values more than what you claim but there's very little movement yes there's some movement out of California there's some movement out of New York but most of the movement out of New York there's some movement because it's cold and most of the movement into Florida is not because of the color of Florida but because it's warm so it's old people move to Florida white old people move to Florida because it's warm and they're tired and they can move to Florida so we overemphasize these differences and the reality is that most of America is not like make America great again or crazy Trumpists and most America likes America most America wants America what Texas would do by leaving the United States is force a significant portion of population probably a vast majority of the population of Texas to leave the United States they want to be Americans most Americans want to be Americans it's the extremes which are a tiny minority that don't want to be part of an America given up on the American project given up on the idea of liberty and freedom and look I think secession if you're succeeding to make things worse a la freedom is evil it's wrong it's absolutely should be opposed and absolutely should go to war over it I'm a huge fan of the Civil War absolutely the North should have invaded the South that's what the South was doing you can't in order to supress in order to enslave people you can't succeed in order to violate individual rights the whole point of a federation is to protect individual rights as soon as they're threatened you say okay you can go your own way go abuse those people over there now the whole point of a federation is to protect those rights the individuals rights the individuals rights when they're being oppressed by the state so you want to create a federation to protect the individual from the state that's why the individual on a massive time secession is good the only time secession should be supported and I don't think red states want to create something freer I don't think anybody in America believes in freedom in the political sense in the political environment red states want to oppress us in one way and blue states want to oppress us in a different way choose your poison again 30 year war small German states slaughtered each other this idea that small is good and small is peaceful is just nonsense Catalonia wants to leave Spain so they can become a socialist little socialist republic and oppress their people more than they have before Scotland certainly if it left the UK would become dominantly socialist why anybody who believes in liberty would want to support secession for the sake of socialism I don't understand they're staying in the UK keeps the individuals within Scotland freer even if they don't recognize it even if they don't know it and what about the minority of Scots who want to stay a part of the UK so no freedom always triumphs and freedom actually triumphs we're actually much more peaceful in bigger units rather than smaller units the most peaceful period in all of European history has been the European Union it's unbelievably peaceful there are lots of problems with it but war is not one of them thank goodness right that particular brutality is not one of them and indeed the one war we have is on the fringe of the European Union and if it was part of the European Union there wouldn't be the war so no establishing big units big units you don't want one unit the whole world but you want several big units is actually a way to reduce conflict and reduce violence not to increase it the more fragmented we are the more violent we are and the best way the best place to see that is not far from here just south go to the Balkans over a little piece of land because this is mine and this is yours and you're treating my ethnic group differently than your ethnic group who the fuck cares what ethnic group anybody is what color what tribal origin the leader of the group is the only thing that matters is liberty and freedom and it doesn't matter who rules and the fact is that the smaller the unit becomes the more tribal it becomes the more authoritarian it becomes the more individual matters so on the individual level that individual would matter the least would what? no he matters the most that's the funny thing in history the country that is respected individual rights the most is one of the biggest countries in the world and that's the United States of America and it's the most diverse country with the most diverse people came lots of Poles and Irish and Italians and Mexicans and all these people came together in one big continent with one big federal government and respected individual rights and were relatively peaceful much more than Europe was not 99% maybe it's 80% the majority of Americans are sitting in the middle culture of immigration culture of changing states and places it's on the decline oh yeah movement between states Americans moving generally is way in decline it was much higher 50 years ago with the welfare state the welfare state the welfare state provides you with all kinds of incentives to stay put the great well even before that starting with the great depression because what it does is if you lose your job you don't go looking for a job you stay put you get welfare and then politicians tell you don't worry you're bringing the steel industry back you can stay in Cleveland when there are plenty of jobs in Arkansas but who wants to go to Arkansas when I can stay in Cleveland and get welfare checks also what happens is a lot of American welfare programs are not federal they're state based so once you sign up for welfare all these things are state you lose that when you move to another place they also real estate is an issue there's a lot you know the most attractive places to move to in the United States we build the fewest houses so real estate prices are really really expensive so I know it's shocking but a lot of people would love to move to California how do we know we like economics right how do we know lots of people want to move to California because demand for real estate is higher than the supply because prices keep going up but they can't move to California because there's not enough supply of housing if California built a huge number of housing the movement of people might shift in spite of the fact that California is blue and therefore evil and therefore nobody should move there so it's not that simple these things are not simple if you look at blue states which are the blue states the net contributors to the tax revenues to the federal government i.e. they are the producers most of the red states are net recipients of government they're the welfare states so it's not true that red states are more productive than blue states it just isn't the reality in America so there's a lot of complexity and you know what the real split in America is it's not blue red it's rural urban rural America is red urban America is blue so in California for example the central valley and north of San Francisco but way north of San Francisco not that close to San Francisco is all red all the rural areas in California are red it's the urban centers that are blue and that's true in in Texas you know, Austin I always thought of Austin, yes Austin but Dallas Houston San Antonio, okay, the Hispanics but even they should be red, why wouldn't they be red all blue every single one of the major metropolitan areas all the richest counties in the United States I think 9 out of 10 of the richest counties in the United States blue it's not these things are not simple and again it's not like red represents liberty and freedom you know red represents oppression and blue represents a different type of oppression again choose your poison I'm for liberty, I'm not for red or blue I don't consider myself left or right anymore the right is completely at least in America and I think in Poland too completely corrupt and the left of course is corrupt and the real spectrum in politics is individualism and collectivism and today the left and the right are both collectivist and almost nobody is individualistic and you know they're classical liberals and they're objectivist and some libertarians who may be individualist but that's it and then there's a vast majority of let's say Americans who kind of in the middle who have a tendency towards individualism but not they don't really have the backbone they don't really have the understanding of what that is I mean it's a complicated issue and it depends on when and so on but I mean my broad perspective of the history of it is that the Jews who came to Israel built a basically free state basically free, it's not it's far from perfect all the caveats all the caveats all the caveats far from perfect, all the caveats and it's an ethnic centered state which is not a good thing either but it is a basically free state and they bought civilization, they bought trade they bought production, they bought culture they built a western civilization in this place and from the beginning the Palestinians rejected them rejected them because no no, it's not it just isn't, if you look at the history the Jews who came they bought property they bought property from landowners Turks, Syrians, Palestinians whoever was there they cultivated the land, they dried swamps, they created industries the first electrification of Israel, of that part of the world under the British occupation and all provided by Jewish capital and people who moved in and built this and created this and the Palestinians from very early on starting in 19 19, 26 or 27, 36 kept violently trying to push them out and get rid of them and then in 1947 the United Nations said look, the Jews here the Arabs here will have two states Jews will have this little sliver because if you've ever been to Israel it's like tiny so we'll have two countries in this tiny little space and the Jews, literally the Jews went out the next day and celebrated cool, we're going to get a state, this is amazing and the Palestinians the next day started shooting and that's the reality and then in May of 1948 when the British said we're leaving and the Jews said okay, we're declaring independence of our own state seven armies from seven different countries invaded what was called Palestine to try to kick the Jews out of there and Israel's been on the defense since then now, is everything Israel does from that perspective right? No is everything they do just? No but in comparison, again it's like Ukraine, Russia in comparison if you compare the two, Israel is an angel as compared to the attitude of the Palestinians in the Arab world they're not angels but in comparison, they're good guys and the Palestinians in the Arab world are the bad guys but the Palestinians say they need to clear a line they're lying they're lying they really are now look, they did take some of the land in a war just like lots of the land in Europe it was determined by who won that particular war if you win a war and people leave their villages and run away you obliged to bring them back even though they won't recognize your existence and even though they want to murder you? No so a lot of Arab villages when Arabs left in 1948 and went to Jordan or went to ultimately land up in refugee camps in Lebanon, they all left does Israel occupy those villages? Sure but that's what happens in war don't start wars because if you lose land, you're not going to get it back so it's on the Palestinians if they hadn't started the war in 1948 there would be two states and by the way there have been multiple times in history over the last 65 years where the Palestinians were offered a state and Israel was willing to accept a Palestinian state and the Palestinians said no, because they didn't get the last 1% of what their demands were they don't want peace, a leadership Palestinian people, like all people I think they want peace they want to take care of their families they want to own a living, just like everybody but the Palestinian leadership has betrayed the Palestinians over and over the decade starting in the early 20th century and all the way to today and the fact that he led the Palestinians destroyed the Palestinians hope for peace and he was offered a Palestinian state and he turned it down and Camp David was in 99 or something so again in comparison Israelis are the good guys and the Palestinians are the bad guys last question I guess I mean it doesn't have to be better if it has the right ideas but small states almost guarantee you're going to fight with one another and they're not going to protect rights how would you comment on the idea of you're going to give me in trouble you're going to give me in trouble I mean I think that should be the goal long term, not under current conditions because you guys in Europe are way too leftist and you would destroy yourself so you'd commit suicide but I think ultimately I go to Prague and I go to Bratislava and I go Czech, Slovakia you understand each other's languages it's almost the same language you look exactly the same you have almost the same culture what the hell this difference and who lost on that Slovakians because Prague liberalized the economy a lot faster than Slovakia so they're much richer than Slovakia it's just these silly disputes which you have over the tiny little bit of cultural differences between Poles and Germans are special but a ridiculous long term now it's going to take a long time but the fact that there's not more mobility within Europe suggests that you're still committed to your little tribes people don't go to where the work is, again also because of welfare so if you lose your job in Poland and you get welfare, you're less motivated maybe to go to Spain where there are jobs or Spanish don't move somewhere else because they get their welfare in Spain and they don't go find jobs somewhere else so yeah, I think it should be a federation of states ultimately hopefully we can erode some of the tribal attitudes that you have and kind of the nationalistic attitudes that you have and I think the world benefits I mean, if I see a kind of a liberty future if I can imagine a future where people respect individual rights and a pro-liberty and capitalism and everything like that I think the world has, I don't know 50 countries total, right? It doesn't have 200, like South America most of them speak Spanish they should be one country they're irrelevant to Chile and Argentina and Colombia and Peru and other differences in culture and so on but they're irrelevant to the issue of liberty if you really have freedom why do we need 75 or 200 countries Brazil should be a separate country because they have a separate language and you know, it's a here you'd have to figure out what language to use as long as it's not German I'm fine with it but I mean the real risk of a unified Europe you know, Germany but that's why you can't do it today you have to do it in a world of individualism and we don't have a world of individualism today but the worst thing that could happen to Europe is to break it up into city-states because then you'd be at each other's throats constantly at least you have a few big countries that are unlikely to go to war in a current situation and partially because of the EU because you're so connected to one another there's so many shared values and so much trade and so many benefits that it would be hard to see another war in Europe between big states but if there were tiny little fragmented states I mean look again, the daily problems they have in the Balkans you know, because they have these tiny little states it's not even clear that they're sustainable those tiny little states but the ethnicities see it's like the blue and red, the ethnicities don't quite follow the borderline so there are conflicts within any particular little state about the particular ethnicities and the clashes between them and that can spiral into wars and genocide and whatever if not for the European Union would Serbia and Kosovo be at peace right now? No, I mean Europe is threatening them they're telling them basically stop this fighting but if Europe didn't intervene they would be at each other's throats right now and so would the rest of the Balkans I mean I went to Montenegro you go to Montenegro, it's one town it's not even a city it's like half a million people and they're proud of being heirs of some Montenegro tribe that arrived there in some century who knows when who cares? but that kind of pride in your heritage going back thousands of years is what's destroying the human race be proud of your achievements as an individual live your life why do you need 500,000 people who shared the same tribal ancestry as you did in order to feel comfortable and again this is what makes America great and this is why America's been the greatest country in the world for so long it's the fact that it doesn't have that or didn't have that and now we're becoming tribal in America and America's going to descend and we want to splinter it and it's going to break it up it's going to become like Europe which is not a compliment it moves out of rationality it's a way for me it's happening at the same time with the time that was reached by looking at science and culture but this is creating a paradox but it's creating a very toxic mix in which humanity achieved also a way to destroy it you cannot even comfort yourself because we are able to destroy their majority the way out is the same as the way in that is the way out is ideas we got to this place because bad ideas primarily German bad ideas so let's reject German bad ideas and embrace good ideas and that's the only way to do it and that's why it can't happen quickly it's a slow process but just like the bad ideas and slowly took over the world the whole 19th century is basically German philosophy corrupting the rest of the world and we got World War I and World War II as a consequence of bad German ideas in my view Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx Nietzsche that string of ideas has corrupted the world we need better ideas than those we get some of those in there's the Ukrainian flag in the background but we got some of those in enlightenment from people like John Locke and the French enlightenment, the British and Scottish enlightenment and then we've got Ein Rand we've got Mises we've got people who have good ideas we need to embrace those ideas we need to educate people about those ideas and they all need to be centered around I think three fundamental concepts reason individualism and every one of those we're losing the battle but those are the things that we need to teach the world and we need to help educate the world and help change the world and if we can do that nothing is deterministic history is not determined as Marx said nothing's inevitable it's up to us this is why I get so upset when people claiming to be advocates of liberty are fans of a dictator or I get upset when people who claim to be fans of liberty are kind of bored by a bunch of young girls standing up to the authorities and declaring them independence which I think should make all of us excited and want to support them if we don't fight for these ideas if we don't fight for this cause then the world is finished so it's up to us it's up to every one of us to fight for them to educate, to talk, to write to let the world know that they're better ideas ideas of peace again, capitalism is the system of peace capitalism leads to peace when we have capitalism, when we embrace capitalism which means individualism and trade we get peace and when we don't we get war and we're moving away from capitalism and individualism so we'll get more thank you oh, oh wait I'm going to get fired if I don't say this alright, the flyer's up here you can get a free Inran book there's a barcode and you can scan the barcode and it'll take you to page with all of Inran's books you can choose which book you want and it'll download for free so anything from Atlas Shrug to her nonfiction 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