 Our guest this weekend is Rod Martin, futurist, a libertarian tech guru and a member of the original PayPal mafia who helped start that company along with Peter Thiel. Rod's here to argue that our future, despite all the macro problems and despite government conflicts around the world, is actually quite bright. He argues that the incredible advancement of wealth and prosperity over the last two and a half centuries is just the beginning and that a technological revolution is going to outcase what the state has in store for us. So if you're interested in some libertarian futurism and optimism, please stay tuned for a great interview with Rod Martin. Well, first and foremost, Rod Martin, thank you so much for joining us on Mises' weekends. It's great to be here. Thank you. Well, so much going on in the world right now. I'd like to start with the refugee situation. In Europe, we've got about 400,000 refugees, mostly of African and Middle Eastern descent. They're fleeing ISIS. They're fleeing civil wars from places like Syria and Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia. It seems like their home countries are completely ill-equipped to deal with these macro crises that are occurring. And it seems like the modern developed Western European countries are almost equally ill-equipped to handle this unannounced migration from these poor folks. Give us your thoughts about the big picture here. Are modern nation states starting to fail to even keep it together? I don't really think that's the problem as much as just the magnitude of dealing with that many displaced people. It's never an easy thing to do. It wasn't easy after World War II. It wasn't easy after the Marriott boat lift. It wasn't easy when South Vietnam fell. When you have this number of people, it just really taxes a system that is optimized for normal life. And it's inevitably going to provoke a certain amount of crisis and a lot of questions about the political ramifications, social ramifications, and so forth. So I'm very sympathetic to the concerns being expressed in Europe. I really do believe that there's a lot of need to be very, very sympathetic to these poor people. At the same time, I would note that you mentioned their home countries are ill-equipped. The truth is that most of the countries in the Middle East are utterly unwilling to deal with them. And that is its own significant distinction between the free world and those parts of the world that are significantly less than free. Do you think the wealthier Western world has a moral obligation to take them in? I think that it is not so much a moral obligation, per se, as just the right thing to do. If a country were to decide collectively, not really speaking of the government so much as the people of a society, if they were to decide that, well, this is our society and we really don't want it disrupted, I don't think that I could hold them accountable for having done wrong. But I think they would be wrong. It's the difference between my being obligated to, say for instance, take care of a homeless guy on the street who needs money and just wanting to. Nobody can force me to do that. Nobody should be able to force me to do that. But at the same time, if I don't think he's going to go spend it on beer, I want to help him. So I think that's kind of the case here, just several orders of magnitude greater. These people have really significant immediate needs and the West is well able to take care of them. It's difficult and disruptive, but it's not that difficult or disruptive. And if we can help them, then we certainly should. Now, having said that, like I said, I completely understand why there are political reasons you might want to do that very carefully or certain areas might not be as interested as others. The problem that we face repeatedly when dealing with the illegal immigration, not sure it's exactly a crisis, but certainly the problem here in the United States is as much that one party is trying to use those people as a way to tip the scales politically in its favor in the long term as it is anything else. In fact, I would say that that single point probably drives this issue more than any other. I don't know that a few hundred thousand people make that much difference if you're talking about France or Germany, but it probably would make a rather extraordinary difference if you're talking about Luxembourg or Liechtenstein. So you can see why some would be concerned about the long term ramifications of this if these people are in fact resettled in the long term. I should say the West has a tendency to want to remake other parts of the world in our own image. In other words, some places in today's world are just not interested in social democracy. They're not interested in capitalist mechanisms, market mechanisms, and they're not interested in political freedoms. So it seems like the West is always and forever having to mop up some of the problems that these lack of freedoms create. I think these problems would exist regardless of the West's tendency to metal. Some of that meddling is justified. Some of it is not. But what is certain is that the Middle East has significant issues that are going to result in honestly an escalating degree of conflict over the next few years. The Iran deal probably guarantees that they will get the bomb. I'm not saying that you should necessarily do a particular different thing. I'm just saying that's the likely result of what is happening. That inevitably results in Saudi Arabia getting the bomb. That probably results in Egypt getting the bomb. There are other societies that will get the bomb. There is going to be more unrest in between here and there and hopefully no nuclear wars, but you can't guarantee it. These are not the most stable places to start with. So we're going to see increased difficulty in that region for the next couple of decades regardless. And the West definitely adds to that, but it would continue regardless. Well, you have a background not only in Silicon Valley tech with PayPal, but also with pharmaceutical drugs and with some charitable efforts. When we look at these gigantic, intractable macro problems like famine and civil war and migration, does technology offer you hope that there are ways to at least alleviate some of these macro problems that can be applied independent of government action? Absolutely, in every respect. And we really don't have to look forward if we would just take a moment to grasp what has happened in the last two and a half centuries. That sounds like an incredibly long time to the average American in particular. We don't have a long history and you go to England and they talk about, you know, this or that college at Cambridge or Oxford is one of the new colleges. And then they get around to mentioning that it was around the time Columbus sale. So, you know, sometimes we lack a little bit of perspective on that. But the fact of the matter is that two and a half centuries in the history of man is the blink of an eye. And if you were to chart out and actually the Cato Institute has done this on their human progress.org site. And we've talked about this a lot on rodmartin.org. Also, if you chart out per capita GDP over the history of man, all of recorded history, it is a flat line until about 1750. Until you hit Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson and the founding fathers in this country. And all of the revolutionary thought of that period, not the French revolutionary thought, which is just proto-communism, but the liberal revolution, what we would today in the United States at least think of as conservative or libertarian. From that moment, it's not just an upward curve. You've gone from the beginning of time flat line on per capita product. And at that point, you shoot straight up. It is the real hockey stick graph. It is unbelievable. And that's just going to continue. I was speaking to a group in Fort Lauderdale a couple of months ago and I was talking about this in terms of what I believe is a 300 year process to eradicate what we would know of as poverty. And I think we're about 250 years into that process. We have seen a billion people lifted out of the low end of poverty just in the last 20 years. Virtually 100% of that is due to capitalism. And you're going to see another billion lifted out of extreme poverty in the next 20 years. All of this is because of freedom, free people acting in the way that Adam Smith described. And it is going to continue. And you see it in technological innovation now that we think of as technology. But truly, Robert Fulton's work with steam engines was absolutely as high tech as the new iPad Pro in its day. So all of this is liberating people. It is causing them to be able to do things they could not do before. If you had been alive in Abraham Lincoln's day, if you had been trying to study lessons at night, it would have been very difficult to do it. We've all heard the story about how Lincoln studied by firelight. Well, try to do that sometime. Try to read by firelight. It is terrible. It is not very practical. And if you keep doing it long enough, you'll ruin your eyes. And that's kind of a problem in an era without good medical care. So you go from that to our being able to work three shifts, to have cultural events in the late evening, to being able to pretty much do anything that you can imagine wanting to do with very little difficulty and very little financial barrier for most people. That has happened very fast. And that's what the technological revolution is bringing about right now. A woman no longer is tied to her home. She does not have to use a washboard and spend hours doing chores that are just almost unimaginable now. But her grandmother did all those things. And we're just going to see that explode. What freedom does, what technology does, what innovation does is it liberates the weakest among us. And when you take those things away and when you take liberty away, what you really do is you empower the strongest. Socialism is just a new iteration of feudalism, of aristocracy, of barbarian tribesmen overrunning Gaul and taking over for the Roman governors who were before them. Freedom and innovation and technology make it possible for people who really couldn't survive in that world to do wonders, to be artists and geniuses of every sort. It's that's the age we live in. That's what's happening. And it'll change the Middle East and everywhere else in due course. It's just changing other places first because we have some of those principles a little more deeply ingrained at this point. So do you think this happy upward trend in material well-being and technology, do you think it is unstoppable? Do you think bad ideas and bad politics pose no threat? They always pose a threat and of course they're physical threats. You know, we could get hit by an asteroid. We could nuke each other. We could do all kinds of stupid things. We could also join the collective socialist delusion. It is not at all unprecedented for societies to doom themselves at the ballot box. I really don't have to point any further than England, which at the end of World War II elected climate athlete in the Labor Party who proceeded to nationalize everything in sight. When I was at Cambridge, Margaret Thatcher had only just recently started the process of privatizing public housing just a few years before I was over there two-thirds of subjects of Her Majesty lived in housing owned by the state. And I mean, this is just so debilitating. They continued over their rationing food for 10 years after World War II because of course the government is so efficient at allocating resources. So they took every possible wrong turn and they really lost two generations of their history. Now having said that, eventually they turned it around because good ideas eventually triumph and eventually people realize that what they're doing doesn't work. So I don't feel super pessimistic in the long run but I'm very cognizant that we're going to take a turn one way or the other in the 2016 election in the United States and it is going to have great consequences for our society at the very least. But Devils Advocate, we tend to think of technology and material well-being as always advancing but there have been periods in human history many centuries long where prosperity didn't really advance at all. Absolutely. And of course I was just describing that a minute ago with the GDP chart. You have long stretches where people largely on a self-inflicted basis burden themselves with bad ideas and it slows down every manner of progress for extended periods. The most egregious example of that is probably not Western. It is probably in China. You've probably heard the tale of Admiral Zhang Ha. I hope I'm not horribly butchering that pronunciation who in the 1400s sailed a massive fleet all over Indochina and the Indian Ocean basin and had he continued would almost certainly have quote unquote discovered Europe. It's very possible that China would have colonized us and the world would have spoken Chinese and thought Chinese and everything else but in fact it worked the other way for one reason. A government decided that bringing in foreign ideas was dangerous to internal stability and they brought the Admiral home. You gotta understand his fleet was so amazing his flagship would have held the Nenia Pina and Santa Maria in its cargo hold. They brought his fleet home. They broke up his ships. They banned any further exploration and within a generation their own coast was being attacked relentlessly by pirates which continued for centuries and eventually the West came to dominate them and they're only now really beginning to resume their place in human history as a leading power. So you can lose six centuries without doing that much and when that has happened historically it has usually been the result of a government making a bad decision. Rod Martin we only have time for one last quick question. The history of the West cannot really be decoupled from the history of Christianity. Can you talk about the role that Christianity at least culturally maybe not theologically played in making the West rich and whether or not what appears to be a momentum towards a post-Christian West can still be a wealthy West. Post-Christianity is disturbing because so much of what we have is directly derived from Christianity. Now some will argue with that statement on a number of levels and we don't have time to get into that today perhaps we can do that another time but really if you boil it down Christianity is responsible for an emphasis on the weak rather than the strong Roman actually every ancient civilization was all about the strong triumphing over the week and glory in not just subjugating but at times destroying those who were weaker. There was a great Islamic scholar in the Middle Ages who actually taught that looting was morally preferable to being a merchant because looting at least involved warrior ethics and honorable traits of battle and all this foolishness. So Christianity emphasized taking care of the weak putting others ahead of yourself doing things that are in our view morally virtuous but to ancients would have seemed ludicrous and stupid and dishonorable but more than that Christianity brought us the golden rule or at least brought the West the golden rule there are similar things in other teachings but they never made an economic impact and the economic impact in the West is very simple and we can sum it up this way and actually I had an article published on this in ink magazine a couple weeks ago to make a living in capitalism you have to think about the other person you have to put their interests first and it doesn't matter if you're an entrepreneur or an innovator or a salesman whatever you are for me to get paid I have to solve your problem I have to think about who you are what you need what you're lacking what you might want I then have to think about how to communicate that to you I have to think about how to market it to you I have to think about what would resonate with you I have to put myself on the line I have to spend my capital I maybe have to get investors spend their capital we have to do all this incredible stuff to bring something to market whether it's a Nike sneaker or a product like PayPal or whatever it is I have to do all of that before I can even come to you and ask for your money and even then you don't have to give it to me even then you make the decision that is the essence of liberty and it does flow very much out of Christian thinking certainly in the West and to the degree it has been adopted elsewhere it has largely been under the influence of the West sometimes a little bit more friendly fashion than others but nevertheless it is a system that encourages a realistic altruism like nothing else on earth it encourages people who would by their nature be selfish to actually be really good people on the most important levels and we have a cultural inheritance in that that I am quite concerned we could lose as we as we shift away from some of those ideas the altruism and the compassion that is talked about in political discourse is usually just I'm going to take your money and give it to that other person that I like more than you and that is no different from the vandals and the Visigoths and that was a bad world they created well Rod Martin I couldn't agree more today our looters often wear Brooks Brothers neckties and live in Washington DC but thank you so much for a fascinating interview and your time today ladies and gentlemen have a great weekend