 when it comes to the issues that the liberals are best on, we're better than them on those issues. And when it comes to the issues that the conservatives are best on, we're better than them at those issues. And so I just think that if it's presented the right way and articulated the right way, you can generate a lot of interest. The comedian and podcaster Dave Smith, who's a rising presence in libertarian party circles, says he's considering seeking the party's presidential nomination in 2024. Smith says that one reason he's likely to run is that even though the 2020 nominee, Joe Jorgensen, got the second highest vote total in LP history, he thinks she didn't push back hard enough on government lockdowns and overreach fighting COVID, which he sees as a missed opportunity to build a bigger libertarian movement. A vocal opponent of wokeness and political correctness, Smith is quick to attack fellow libertarians, whom he thinks are naive about how the state maintains its power. He's said that he'd take a red-pilled lefty over a blue-pilled libertarian any day. After the Biden White House revealed it was pushing Facebook to restrict accounts, it says or spreading misinformation about COVID-19. Smith tweeted that this administration has exposed the useful idiots who call themselves libertarians saying it's a private company for the last few years, ignoring what is obviously the biggest threat to liberty. They unwittingly support the largest government in human history. After that take was discussed on a recent Reason Roundtable podcast, Smith tweeted that my fellow panelists and I had misrepresented his views. So I reached out to him so he could clarify his views on the intersection of big government and big tech to discuss the future of the libertarian party, why he has no plans to vaccinate himself or his young daughter, and why he believes libertarians should be more engaged in the culture world. Dave Smith, thanks for talking to Reason. Thank you for having me, Nick. Good to be with you. Yeah, it's been a while. I interviewed you four years ago, almost to the day, about your excellent document or a special Libertas, that seems a long time ago. And then two years ago, almost to the day, you and I were on a filmed version of Thaddeus Russell's unregistered podcast. Yeah. Yeah, which, you know, that was fun too. So today, though, you know, I mean, as a starting point, you came up for discussion, some of your comments about Facebook and big tech, libertarian section 230, you know, government regulation and libertarian responses to big tech. You came up on a Reason Roundtable podcast and you called out Catherine Manga Ward, Reason's editor-in-chief, and myself for misrepresenting you. What did we get wrong? Everything. Okay. All right, interview over. Yeah, that's it. Okay, I think our job here is done. Well, I will say this, if I'm being as charitable as possible, which I do not think you and Catherine- Yeah, you don't believe in charity, do you? Well, I, yes, I do. I'm not a Randian. I'm a Rothbardian. Nothing wrong with charity. But if I'm being charitable unlike you two, I would say that perhaps, you know, I could have been clearer in my tweet what I was saying. But I certainly don't think a charitable interpretation of what I was saying was that Facebook is the government and there's no difference between Facebook and a government. And I don't think a charitable interpretation of what I was saying was your claim that I was just chasing Trump outrage or something like that. My position and what I was saying in that tweet is that- And this is the tweet where you talked about useful idiots who call themselves libertarian have been saying, you know, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, it's a private company, you know, and that's just, that's a bad thing. No, well, specifically what I was saying, obviously it's a private company line is in response to big tech censorship that this has been a certain group of libertarians response to, well, what do you think about this problem? Well, it's a private company, they can censor whoever they want to. And in some cases, even saying that this is the market, you know, weeding out bad actors, and this is what we want, you know, not government intervention, but instead these companies saying, well, if you say such horrible things, we just won't Yeah, that Count Dankula is just, we cannot exist and have a decent society if Count Dankula is allowed to post on Patreon or, yeah, et cetera. Yes, right. So some people do seem to have that attitude, believe it or not. But what I was saying is that, and this came on the heels of Joe Biden saying Facebook is killing people and his press secretary just blatantly saying that we are putting together lists of people who we want censored and we want them censored across all platforms. So all social media companies. It's an outrage. Well, I absolutely think so. It's a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It's clearly government, as libertarians know, government isn't just making suggestions. There are very not so thinly veiled threats here. Yeah, or rather when they are just making suggestions, it's much, much more than that. Yes. And these are, they have hauled all of the big tech heads in front of Congress many times and explicitly threatened them if they do not deal with this problem of whatever, fake news. And of course, this is ramped up during COVID. So the point I was making is that the libertarian response to this shouldn't be, well, that's the market. They're a private company. The libertarian response to this should be to point out that this is clearly a result of government intervention in the market that's led to this censorship spree, which is, I believe, a very real threat to an open society. Yeah. Okay. So just to be fair, to be charitable back to you, I have long been saying that I think YouTube, Facebook, Twitter has a right. They are private companies. They have a right to kick off who they want and almost always the decision to kick anybody off other than somebody who is calling for immediate inciting a mob to kill people who are right outside their door is a bad decision. So I don't know many libertarians who are like, well, it's a private company and you can't do anything. It's like when my restaurant gets down the street, gets rid of my favorite meal and I'm just like, well, that's the free market. I'll go eat somewhere else. You're going to complain. You're going to bitch and moan. You're going to try and change the situation before you have to find a new restaurant. Yeah. I agree with that. But that's what I'm doing. I wasn't advocating any government policy. I'm complaining. Yeah. So very loudly. And you do complain extremely well. I'm one of the best. You are. If you weren't the best damn complainer, I don't know what you'd be worth. But then what is a couple of things then? How is what, say, Biden and Democrats are doing, is that very different than when Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and a bunch of other douchebag Republicans send letters to Amazon and say, we want to know why you aren't carrying this or that book, which we happen to agree with, but you for whatever reason have pulled from your shelf. Well, I think they're different. I don't know if either one is good. I think that as usual, the Republicans are reactionary to what's happening and proposing limp, pathetic, unworkable solutions that are guaranteed to lose if not make the problems worse. But that's just what Republicans do. But I think that they're, to me, I look at it like this. As you remember, around 2015, around 2016, the internet was, and as a libertarian, I mean, this is the highest compliment, the wild, wild west. I mean, people could say whatever they wanted to. It was very rare. Given that I am a couple of thousand years older than you, I remember 1995, 96 when the internet was really wild. But yes, I'm speaking about these social media platforms specifically. I mean, Facebook, Twitter, all of these platforms, people were saying wild things and there was no rush to kick people off because obviously all of the incentives lined up. Why would Facebook or Twitter want to spend an enormous amount of money and resources to kick customers out of their virtual store? It's just like there was no incentive for it. And what happened was in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost and the whole establishment, the corporate press in the political class, could not accept the obvious reality, which is that Hillary Clinton lost because she was an intensely unlikeable, transparently corrupt politician. And so it had to be- And it ran a terrible campaign. She lost. All she had to do was put a layup in with a minute to go. And even to the people be like, well, she won the popular vote or whatever. I mean, she should have been a blowout. This was her race to lose. And so the narrative became like Russia and racism and of course, fake news. And this is when the government started putting enormous pressure on the social media companies to crack down on all of this stuff. Can I, I don't disagree with your, you know, there's no question that the establishment and certainly legacy media or corporate media, whatever you want to call it, you know, was flabbergasted that Hillary Clinton lost. And they were super pissed that Trump won, even though Trump, as we've seen since he's left office, Trump fattened the, you know, the, the rating counts and the profit margins of all of these things, you know, substantially. But then Trump was in charge and the Republicans were in charge of the House and the Senate. So how did the government, I guess one of my questions is like, it seems to me when you say the only reason why Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are starting to clamp down on people is because of the government. Isn't it also because the people who run those companies and not necessarily Mark Zuckerberg, you know, or the people at the top, but the mid-level people who actually come in and check the dials and, you know, and, and read the valves and stuff like that every day, they hate certain people who use these platforms extremely effectively. They're the ones who are squeezing. Jeff Bezos doesn't give a shit what Booker is, is or is not sold on Amazon, right? It's, it's like some mid-level flunky who's throwing a fit. Again, I'm sure that the ideological beliefs of the people who run these companies have some effect on this. I wouldn't say they don't. And like, yeah, I think the fact that probably they're all run by a bunch of left-wingers had, had some effect on this. But all of those people were still there and had the same ideological views back in 2015. And there was just no move to really censor dissident voices. And so I think if you look at what happened, it was, to me, it's pretty clear that the government interference, or at least the government threats, if not just, you know, actual regulations that were passed, are what created this environment, or certainly, certainly were the major driving force. Okay. You know, I, and I agree completely that it's a major force in all of this. I think also when you go back to 2018 and, you know, again, you know, it's interesting that, that, you know, social media magnets are being called to testify before Congress, as well as people like Tim Cook of Apple and whatnot. And they all to a person said, you know what, the time has come to regulate our sector. And I don't think they were doing that part, you know, I mean, and this, I think we would agree, somebody like Ludwig von Mises and, and certainly people like public choice economists, you know, James Buchanan and whatnot would say, look, you know, what we're witnessing here is an industry that's been around for, you know, five, 10, 15, 20 years, maybe it's getting mature. They recognize, you know, and this is true, Facebook has flat or declining average daily use, Twitter can expand its marketplace. Face, you know, YouTube needs to lock in. These are the companies are calling for the regulation, because they know, and Zuckerberg said this before he testified to Congress in 2018, you know, it's time to regulate. We'll have to write the regulations of Facebook because you guys don't know what the fuck we're doing. And, you know, well, you'll get the regulations, Facebook will get our market share and, you know, we'll both win, but there'll never be another Facebook. So I mean, how much of it is, how much of this is, you know, big government and big business ultimately are, you know, I think a lot of libertarians like to see them as diametrically opposed, you know, resistible force, a movable object. And no, these, you know, they're kind of like twin sons. Yeah, well, this is what Rand got completely wrong and Rothbard got completely right, is that the crony relationship between these big companies and the government is to both of their benefits. And yeah, of course, I mean, why would Facebook be asking for regulation when they can regulate their own company, however they want to? It's because they want that regulation also enforced on would-be competitors. And this is nothing new. I mean, Walmart was pushing for minimum wage laws forever. Right. After a long time, they pushed against it. And then they were like, hey, you know what, we can suck it up and we can put a lot of people out of business. Yeah, they realized it'll actually help them. And this, I mean, this is true across, if you look at like, it's probably 90% of regulation is lobbied in by the big businesses in that industry, because it benefits big business to have much higher hurdles to jump over for upstarts. So that part doesn't surprise me at all. But I think to like the broader idea of what you're bringing up, it's very difficult in this kind of crony capitalist, which I don't really like that term, but you know, quasi-fascist. And Lord knows we're not going to use capitalism, which is- You're getting trouble for that. You know, Gene Epstein is constantly talking about, but yeah, it's about cronyism. Whatever. Whatever you want to call big business being in bed with big government. It makes it very difficult to kind of, you know, slice and dice these things away. I mean, just the other day, there was a company, I can't remember their name, but they got, they were written up in a Guardian piece as the company that is flagging, you know, extremist content on Facebook or domestic terrorists or whatever they call it. And they got, I think close to a million dollars from the Department of Homeland Security in the last year. Now, okay, that's not exactly the government, but it's definitely not the market, you know, or it's certainly not a free market. So it is hard to figure out exactly how to think of these things. My major point with that tweet, I've expanded a lot more on podcasts about it, but my major point is that the libertarian response should be to explain how government poisons everything. And more broadly speaking, how politics poisons everything. I agree with that. And I'm happy to represent, you know, that those are every conversation I've been involved with stresses that kind of thing. But then let me ask, like, so with something like section 230, and I hear an increasing number of libertarians say things like, well, section 230 is problematic because it gives special leverage to big tech companies and big tech platforms, you know, and that you can either be a publisher or a platform, but you can't be both. Or, you know, are you comfortable with something like section 230, which allows platforms to moderate or not, without being liable for comments that material like commenters put up, but also that they can do some but not all. Is that a better outcome than what we're likely to get? Or what is your what is your preferred intervention then to change any of this? Well, I mean, ideally, I'd like to see absolutely no government intervention in this. And I think that for and I've said this many times on Twitter on my podcast, I've never heard a proposed solution, a government proposed solution for tech censorship that I think would address the situation. And in most cases, would make it much worse. Does that include laws like, you know, Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas have either pushed or actually passed and signed into law, you know, bills that would say you cannot kick anybody off your platform. You can, you know, so you get into this weird position where, you know, a few years ago, Republicans, conservatives in particular would be saying like, hey, you know, you know, don't bake the cake, you don't have to bake a cake. If you know, if a gay Nazi couple comes to you and say they want a wedding cake and you're a Christian anti Nazi baker, you know, you're not, you don't have to, you're a private business, you don't have to bake that cake. But then conservatives now are saying, you know what, you're not allowed, if you're Twitter, if you're Facebook, you're not allowed to kick off people, you're not allowed to moderate content because we think you're going to fuck over conservatives. And of course, the flip is also true where liberals, you know, suddenly channel their fucking inner Rothbard, you know, to say like, oh, you know what, if you don't like Facebook kicking off countdown, you let go build your own internet, and then we're going to do everything possible to make it impossible for you to actually maintain that or stay in business online. Well, I agree with you on the libertarian principle. I guess what I would see just in real life being the very big difference between the bake the cake stuff and the tech censorship stuff is that the bake the cake stuff was never actually a threat to gay people's ability to be able to get cakes at their wedding. Even in the Supreme Court case, the guy gave them a recommendation for another baker who would be happy to cater their wedding, whereas tech censorship is legitimately a threat to dissident right wing voices being spread. But I agree with you on the libertarian principle. I'm just in terms of the practicality of it, I don't understand the section 230 argument. I mean, if you were to repeal section 230, that would make the problem enormously worse. Now you would be saying that these tech companies would be on the hook for what voices on their platforms are saying. And if that were the case, then I think they would have to censor every dangerous voice off of their their platform. So I just like practically speaking, I don't even understand what those people are advocating for. The DeSantis bill, I don't know. I don't exactly know how that would work. So you just couldn't kick anybody off. If you're a social media platform, and of course, even what that means, it gets a little bit squirrely around the edges. But of a certain size, you would not be able to kick off politicians who are running for office. So this is to keep Trump from being bounced. But then users would be able to sue you if they were kicked off or suspended for various reasons. So it would add to litigation. It's currently there's a stay on it because it's being kind of looked at for constitutionality. Because anytime you force somebody to carry speech they don't want to, that's obviously runs afoul of the First Amendment in an obvious way. Yeah. I mean, this sounds like something that would end up being struck down by higher courts. But even if not, I mean, just the practicality of going through the courts for individuals to sue huge, multi-billion-dollar corporations. Oh, it always works out. Yeah, just practically doesn't seem like a solution. I'm sure you're still getting asbestos checks, right? In 50 to 70 cent increments. Do you, to that larger question of do you think, and from your own experience, obviously you're not a conservative, you're libertarian, but you're right-leaning, I think you would probably agree. Have you had any real problems with censorship on any of the major platforms? Because one of the arguments that's going on here is just an empirical argument. Are conservatives, is their reach and voice limited? And people like Ted Cruz will always point to diamond and silk. They got screwed over. But people like Ben Shapiro, people like Donald Trump, when he was on, and it's a big when, that's a huge thing that he's not on anymore. But do you feel like your ideas are not receiving the amplification that they would if you were kind of a left-wing progressive? I mean, that's hard to know, kind of like a counterfactual. I don't know exactly what my views would receive one way or the other. You could quite possibly make an argument that if I were a left-winger, my ideas would be amplified more. Or if I was a Trump supporter, I mean, if I had just jumped all in with Trump in 2016, I think I probably could have increased my audience by quite a bit because a lot of people did that and increased their audience by a lot. By the way, I don't know if I would consider myself a right-leaning libertarian, but I'm not offended by it. Like that's fine if that's someone considers me. My Facebook group, I had a private group for subscribers, supporting listeners of my podcast, and that got kicked off Facebook. So that was the most that I personally dealt with. How did that happen? Yeah, I mean, that's awful. What were the grounds and what was the process? So it really all happened during the COVID stuff. So early like March, April, May of 2020, all of a sudden this group that had been around for years and we had always had radical political conversations in there, all of a sudden it was like every day something was getting flagged as fake news. Like every day and it was all COVID related stuff. And to be completely honest about it, some of it was fake news. It was stuff that people were sharing articles. And when you're saying it's flagged, did that mean that it was blocked or that it came with some kind of sticker saying, hey, this is kind of horseshit. Go here to read the real news. Both. So both were happening. Almost everything. Almost everything that mentioned the word COVID had a sticker that, okay, here's where you get the real information. But then they started actually taking things down. And I would get messages because I was the moderator of the group every single day. Now, just back to what I was saying, some of it was false. Some of it was accurate and turned out to be far more accurate than what the corporate press was telling us at the time. I mean, this is real early on. So things like ventilators are actually killing people and not helping them. Like some local doctor talking about what he's seen with his patients who turned out to be completely right. Things about the Wuhan lab theory, which I guess still is not completely figured out, but is certainly an accepted hypothesis now and wasn't at the time. Lots of other stuff about how lockdown areas were doing no better than areas that didn't lock down. And so it was like every day, every day, this has been removed, this has been removed. And I kind of saw where it was going. And then Facebook switched it to a thing where I had to approve the posts, which was new. It used to just be anyone could post who was in the group. And then they made me approve. You had the, as a group leader, you had the ability to either say, people have to run it by me first or I can do it. But then they switched it. So you have to approve everything. And both because of my, you know, free speech inclinations and pure laziness. I was like, I don't want to go through everything here. Just post. That's the idea. It's a free speech zone or so I thought. And so I knew I was like, now they're like almost making me responsible because I clicked approve. And then shortly after that, they just, they, they booted the whole group. They said we could review it. We could contest it and review, which we did. We contested it. And they never gave us anything to this, to this day, if you go on there, the group still says, you'll hear back from us shortly. And we just never heard anything about it. Where did you, did you take the group to another platform? Yeah, we're on Miwi now. So, so, you know, as a practical matter, that's like a shit deal, right? I mean that you get, you know, you, you build a nest, you feather a nest in a particular place. It's working well. Facebook is great because of the network effect. So many people are on it. But you were able to move elsewhere. So that's not good. But do you consider like, where do you rank that in terms of kind of, you know, censorship versus annoyance versus whatever? I think, I mean, for me personally, it was more of an annoyance than anything else. It wasn't, you know, like career, you know, threatening or anything like that. It was, I think for some of the people who are in the group, the group meant a lot to them and that, that sucked that it got, it got taken away. But yeah, no, that wasn't, I don't consider myself like a victim of this. I do think that I am like a lot of people in my space, which I think in some ways is the intended outcome of the censorship stuff, is that you're always kind of worried about what to say. And you're always a little bit on edge. And let me make sure I don't say that, you know, go a little bit too far here or there. I try my best to manage that. But no, I have not been a victim, if you want to say, of censorship in the way that a lot of other people have, where they're just completely unpersoned and kicked off of everything. And, you know, how do you feel about, you know, the rise of stuff like Patreon, which has its own problems because Patreon, you know, both created a new platform where a lot of people could go and then they started kicking people off at various points for stuff that was not even on Patreon. But then there's Substack, there's Clubhouse, there's, you know, a proliferating number of platforms or programs and apps that allow people to communicate in ways that are outside the reach of censorship. So, I mean, I guess what I'm asking is, in the balance, there's no, I don't think there's any question that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter are locking down more. And, you know, whether it started in 2015 or 2010, or, you know, whatever, there's no question, I think, that the direction is clear. You know, they're going to allow less and less speech. You know, that's wide ranging. But do you feel like we are in a position where we can still find places and that that, you know, in that sense, Dodge City has been locked down, but, you know, 100 miles down the road, you know, freedom still exists. Right. Well, I think it's better that those places exist than that they don't. But to me, the real problem, right, is that if you kick, you know, if you kick all the right-wingers off of, you know, Twitter and Facebook, and then all the right-wingers go to some alternative, and the problem is that now no one's talking to each other. And so it just, it just has the effect of radicalizing more and more both sides. And I've seen this a lot where there was some of those right-wingers who get booted off, like now they're only on the right wing site. And so now all of their incentives are to become way more hardcore right-wing because that's your entire audience now. And yeah, I suppose there is something perhaps libertarians aren't inherently opposed to self-segregation if it's voluntary or whatever. And in the case like companies can decide who they want to have on, right? I'm channeling my Rothbard here. But I do think there's something, particularly from, to me from the libertarian perspective, what's really concerning about it is that I think that we're still in this phase where so many people, such a huge portion of the American population, has still not been introduced to our ideas. And we're kind of in the business of introducing them to our ideas. And a certain percentage of them, like I was one of them at one point, and I'm sure you were at one point two, they had their lives changed by these ideas. And like we're really persuaded and convinced that that fight, believing in liberty is the path to a better, more moral, more prosperous society. And if we're just talking to ourselves, then we really don't have the opportunity to convince more people. So I see that, I see it as a real dangerous threat in that aspect. Like just the other day, there was this article about how, as you mentioned PayPal partnering up with the Anti-Defamation League to go after this extremist content. And what are they listing there? You know, it's like all these different things and then anti-government organizations. Well, what's an anti-government organization? I mean, as reason, I could certainly argue that reason is an anti-government organization, that Kato is an anti-government organization. And you hear when John Brennan throws us in at the end of the list of these terrorists. I mean, look, it's hilarious and all that. But this is something libertarians should be really concerned about. When the former director of the CIA is lumping you into a group of terrorists, that doesn't just mean I don't like you. There's a little bit more to that. And to me, that's a real threat. So is the way forward, though, I mean, I think about this in terms of the political economist Albert Hirschman who talked about exit voice and loyalty. When you are given a shit situation, whether you're at your job or in your church or in your government in your state, you can either suck it up and become a company man. That's loyalty. You can use voice, which is to complain and whine and bitch and moan and to use whatever mechanisms of reform and change are built into the system. That's voice. And then there's exit, which is the purest kind of response. And the most freeing, but it comes at a strong cost. Because it's like if you have to leave England to come to America in order to start to worship God the way you want. That's kind of great, but it's really, it's extreme. And is there a better way of doing things then? Basically, I think what we're both talking about is voice and exit, where you complain and I want to live in a world where the common conversation, whether it's happening at Facebook, which has the right to kick anybody off at wants, et cetera, but they should be supporting as broad an array of voices as humanly possible. And we should be building out alternative platforms that in case that doesn't work or to keep them in line, et cetera. But is there a way beyond kind of voice and exit that I'm missing? Well, perhaps I don't have it, but perhaps there is a way. Maybe there's some tech genius out there who's going to figure out a way to kind of decentralize the internet and figure out a way where we can all communicate together. Because that's the question that decentralization is, I think that's happening. And I was at a Bitcoin conference recently where Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square is actually pouring billions of dollars into a decentralized messaging app like Twitter that can't be censored. Twitter, where the New York Post would be able to run all the Hunter Biden stories it wants as it should have been able to on Twitter. And as well as payments, too. Distributed payments. But then you do lose that. It's like either or. You can either have a decentralized space, but then people aren't talking to each other in the same way as if. Can you imagine a world with three network broadcast networks where actually libertarians and a bunch of other people all over the political spectrum were given an opportunity to talk to a mass audience? Or do we have to be in a more kind of polarized, distributed kind of mediascape? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that is. I've always been a big believer in, I suppose you say, the power of complaining. But I don't mean that in like a diminished sense of the word complaining. I point to this a lot on my show, but if you remember, I know you remember well when Obama announced that we were going to war with Syria and he was not talking about what we did in Syria. He was saying we're having another Iraq war in Syria. Like this is what we're doing. And there was this massive, just like, like hell no campaign led primarily by active duty military who were tweeting pictures of themselves with like their faces covered because they're really not allowed to do this. And they were like, we will not fight on the side of al-Qaeda. Like those active duty military knew whose side we were fighting on in Syria. And there was so much pushback that he stopped and he didn't do it. This is the same thing that happened with SOPA and the efforts to regulate the internet at one point. Enough pushback from the population. You can stop this stuff. And by the way, this just happened when Biden floated out the idea of the vaccine passports and everyone lost their mind about it. And so I think there's a lot of power and what I would like to see is like a large movement of people very angrily and seriously opposing tech censorship to see if that maybe could put some pressure on them. Now I know, and I think this is the problem libertarians always face, is that that just doesn't sound as good as some DeSantis or Ted Cruz type figure saying, we're going to write a law and not let you do it. And this is the same problem we have with the left wingers with health care and stuff like that. It just, it sounds much better to the average person to say, we're going to write a law and there's no more premiums. That's our solution. But unfortunately, those solutions don't work and often just make the problem worse. Let's talk about COVID vaccines, lockdowns, and things like that. And then I want to make sure that we talk about the LP, the Libertarian Party, where you are becoming a rising presence at LP and LP adjacent events and things like that. Where are you? I think you're right that everybody kind of freaked out over the vaccine passport idea. We see a residue of that ending up, you know, where business, I mean, do you think should businesses, a private business, a bar, a restaurant, a baseball stadium, which might be a blurred place, should they have the right to say, you know, if you're not vaccinated, you can't come in? Or, you know, or do they have that right? But is it a stupid decision? And do we, you know, how do we adjudicate these kinds of issues? For small companies, I mean, I think they have the right. I really, I mean, I do think it's a stupid decision. But I think that the market would basically take care of that on its own. That like, you know, it's if you're going to say, I mean, small businesses after the year they had in 2020, the idea that they are going to like, you know, not how many times have you seen and everybody on here seen stores that had mask mandates, and someone comes in without a mask and the owners just like, Yeah, come here real quickly. They want your business and they're especially over the last 18 months. I mean, they did just read an account of a place in Orange County, California, where they will not let you shop there or eat there. It was a restaurant if you are vaccinated. So, you know, so the market, you know, it finds something for everybody. Yes, there I'm sure there will be goofy exceptions here and there. But I just I'm not too concerned with that problem. I think it gets into an interesting dicey area, but that something like a stadium that is completely funded by taxpayer money, discriminating against a large group of the taxpayers who they expropriate that money from. Yeah, that's that's pretty out there to make and clearly schools, you know, where a K through 12 schools in particular, there is mandatory attendance. And then if there are mandatory vaccines, are you against all mandatory or any vaccine being mandatory? Or is it COVID? Okay, so mumps me as Rubella should not be mandatory. Absolutely not. And should people should a public meeting place be ever be able to say, you know what, like if you're if your kid is in vaccinated for these things, they can't come in here. I was already against it when you said public meeting space. Okay, yeah, but you know, assuming there is like, you know, in a world of private, and you know, and actually like private schools tend to be much more kind of woke and extreme on the vaccination stuff, right? That's true. So, you know, what so there should never there's a much stronger argument, I would say for say measles, the vaccine for that, then there is for COVID, just because kids actually get sick from it. Is that the is the anti vaccine, like mandate, is that based on a kind of axiomatic principle, you know, do you mosey in language is it axiomatic or is it, well, you know, it's smallpox is super deadly and super contagious. So maybe we mandate a vaccine against that until it's wiped out. But, you know, COVID is, you know, got an infection fatality rate of somewhere south of, you know, 1% and it doesn't affect kids. So we let that slide. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that it has to be a choice between operating on first principles or practicality. I mean, they go hand in hand at times. But yes, I think on a purely principled level, I believe that you own yourself and that once you concede that you don't own yourself on the practical level, you're going to get a lot of really bad outcomes from that and egregiously immoral ones. Also, on the practical level, I mean, we know and we've known for a long time who is vulnerable from COVID. And those people have all had the opportunity to be vaccinated if they want to. And to me, it's like you almost like, look, obviously, you could go in some libertarian, you know, purist perspective on this, that there is a violation of freedom to have mandatory vaccinations, that it also be a violation of freedom to ban businesses from requiring vaccinations. But living in reality, what the actual threat is right now, I mean, I think we've witnessed child abuse on the largest scale imaginable that certainly in my lifetime of what's been done to school kids over the last 16, 17 months. So that's where my concern is and where I think the actual crisis that's facing the country is. I don't think the concern is that the government won't let some small business, you know, mandate vaccines in their business. I think the concern is when Joe Biden is floating out the idea of a national caste system based on an app that can track your location and medical history. And so, you know, at a certain point, we have to like live in reality and deal with what the actual threats to liberty here are. Do you, I've seen you talk about COVID and you say, you know, it is a nasty disease and whatnot. Are you vaccinated? No. Okay. And you're not going to get vaccinated? No plans to. Okay. Do you, are your parents vaccinated? Yes. And should they be? Or I mean, or, you know, I'm just trying to get a sense of, do you think the vaccines work? Or do you think the vaccines don't work? Or is it more just a combination of risk factors and things like that? From the data, I mean, I'm certainly no expert on this. I believe, you know, people should have the choice. And that's fine. From the data that I've seen, it does seem like the outcomes after people get COVID are not as bad for those that are vaccinated. It does seem that you're less likely to get very, very sick or die from COVID. I'm not sure that it's conclusive that it's, you don't get it. I mean, like that doesn't, that doesn't seem to be a very strong data. As far as the like, like adverse effects, the numbers don't really seem to be anything that jumps out at me. However, I think that for young people without underlying conditions, I just don't see a very strong argument for why they should be vaccinated against something that most likely, if you get it, is, is, I mean, not most likely, that is such an understatement. The overwhelming, you know, like odds, the odds of a very negative outcome from COVID are almost not the same. The odds of being hospitalized are in the low single digits. The odds of dying are in the vanishingly small. And I would never, I just would not, this is what I said on Rogan's podcast that ended up going viral. I mean, I didn't really get in trouble for it. It was really just, they cared what, what Rogan was saying, not so much what I was saying. But I was just like, yeah, no, there's no way I would vaccinate my two and a half year old. I mean, I don't know. I would just, I would, I would never do something like an intervention in my daughter's health care that wasn't something for her to benefit her. So I just, I wouldn't give her an experimental vaccine for something she's not at risk of until there was just a lot more data on it. What do you think is the end game of the, you know, kind of of the COVID lockdown? Because, you know, we're obviously on some profound way, we're out of it. You know, things have opened up quite a bit. But on the other hand, it seems as if this is dragging on and on. And I see more and more governors, more and more people in the federal government are saying, look, vaccine rates or vaccination rates are falling. You know, we have the delta variant now and things like that. Are we, you know, short of getting more people vaccinated, how do we come out of this? How do we come out of, you know, a place where we get to a point where, you know, and this was my position from the beginning, it's one thing for the government to say, look, here are safety protocols that will help protect you from this. Here they are. And now you can choose whether or not, you know, as a business owner or as an individual, live your life accordingly. How do we get to a place where the government isn't actually saying, okay, you're an essential worker and essential business, you get to do this, or we're going to be shutting things down? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think, you know, when you ask like, what is the end game? It almost is assuming that there is an intended end game, and that the future is predetermined, which I don't believe either, you know, this is like kind of the Alex Jones mistake that he always makes, is the idea that everyone has this plan that that, you know, is this conspiracy, whereas there are conspiracies all over the place. But then there's like competing conspiracies, and there's there's difference of opinions within the ruling elite about how what they want to do. I think that a lot of these things are simply driven by incentives. And it's unbelievable to see like how much the the corporate press gets upset about like Joe Rogan saying, you know, for example, when I was on saying, hey, you know, if you're young and healthy, I don't really think you need to worry about the vaccine, just stay really healthy. Like this is an outrage. Yet I don't see any of them doing stories. I mean, when was the last time you saw like a really good piece on exactly how much these big pharmaceutical companies have made off this vaccine? Like what exactly is the bottom line for FISA, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson by getting these these patents on these vaccines and getting this FDA, you know, early permission to use them? I mean, I think that right there explains a lot of what the end game is. There is enormous amounts of money being made off of these the vaccines. There's enormous amounts of money being made off the lockdowns by big businesses. I mean, they've literally shut down all of their competitors for months on end. Are we getting out of it now? I mean, yeah, kind of. But then it seems like there's a big push for people to go, you know, try to kind of crack down. They just reintroduced mask mandates in LA and I believe in, where was the other place that they just re in Vegas? They just reintroduced mask mandates. But there's also a lot of people who like that, right? You know, and so it, you know, part of it is a hearts and minds thing, right? Where you have to get, you know, the average person to be like, you know what, I'm done. I'm living my life. For as many as we can. Having said that, what do you think is the worst outcome or what is the worst thing fallout from the past 15, 18 months of lockdowns? You know, part of it is the amount of government spending is just, you know, immeasurable and seems to be continuing. Is it that? Is it the precedent of in peacetime saying, okay, certain businesses are essential, certain businesses are not, you know, that kids can be kind of held hostage, you know, at will. What for you are the worst outcomes of, you know, what we've gone through? That's a tough competition because there's so many just devastating ones. I mean, okay, the tens of millions of small businesses that have been completely destroyed. I mean, I don't know what the, how many families have been broken and how many just like lives have been, you know, just destroyed over that. That's probably the worst. The children who have fallen behind, you know, from the virtual learning and all of this stuff, that's pretty damn bad. The potential destruction of our currency. I mean, if that really goes as bad as it possibly could and probably will, this is going to result in just unbelievable amounts of suffering for tens of millions of Americans. And on top of all that, yeah, the precedent that's been set, that the government now, I mean, even in the worst of the Bush administration abuses of the Constitution, they always kind of tried to have some loose constitutional justification for it. You know, they would at least make an argument, I mean, they were really bad arguments, but they would at least make an argument that like, well, Congress doesn't have to declare the war because they authorized the president to go fight the war or whatever it is. It's not torture. It's enhanced interrogation. You know, they would say these things because it's clearly illegal if they just said we torture people, right? But with this, I mean, Governor Murphy in New Jersey just said to Tucker Carlson, point blank, we're not thinking about the Bill of Rights. We don't care about that. And that is, I mean, the precedent that's been set now, that the government can lock you in your home, deem you unessential. Why exactly can't this be used for climate or whatever the next emergency, next or how about this one? You know how like every few years, there was always like a scare, like swine flu or Ebola or bird flu or whatever. What do we do when the next one comes? How is this society going to handle the next scare, which will inevitably come in the next couple of years, and most likely will not turn out to be like COVID and will just be one of those other things. But no politician is going to want to be the one who didn't act early. So if we don't wake up a lot of people, we're in a real dangerous spot here. So it's hard to say because those are precedents. Will those be the disasters that they could be in the future? I don't know. The other ones are staring us right in the face. So definitely the debt and the money supply being destroyed. But most importantly to me so far are just the real human lives that have been destroyed. You know, talking about how to combat this or waking people up is a good segue into talking about the Libertarian Party. You are part of the Libertarian Party, Mises Caucus. You know, I guess first off, are you running for the presidential nomination in 2024? I still, I mean, you know, I know I've talked about thinking about it. It's a yes or no question. As you ask me the question, it just sounds so ridiculous. But I actually am considering the idea. Okay. So you, I mean, if you are chosen, you will run. You're not going to be, you know, who is it? William Tecumseh Sherman saying, you know, if nominated, you won't run. Oh, well, I think I'd have to run to get the nomination. So I don't think they're just going to like pick me without you know, I don't know, you have a rising profile. And so, but you're thinking about running. Yeah, I'm actually like very seriously considering it. Okay. So what I guess is think, how, what would you say, what should the Libertarian Party be doing, you know, coming out of COVID or whether we are not, you know, it's 2021? You know, what, what does the messaging need to be for the Libertarian Party? Well, I, I mean, if we're talking about 2024, I guess it depends on where we're at with all this COVID stuff. I mean, you know, if it was, if it was 2020, let's say, let's just say hypothetically, the Libertarians had a presidential election in 2020. Yes, that's a stretch, but yeah, let's do it. Well, the absolute center of the campaign should have been opposing the entire COVID regime. I mean, you're the party who stands for liberty and the government just locked people in their house for the year. I mean, it writes itself, like if we just, if we just discussed this on paper in the abstract, and this had never happened, it would be like, well, what if the government did this? What should the Libertarian Party run on? It would be so obvious that we're the party of not shutting down. I mean, and this was Joe Jorgensen and Spike Cohen. Did they not run on that? Or was it just that they were not very good at, you know, inflaming passion about that? I think they really should have made it a central point of the campaign, and it became a minor footnote. I mean, if you asked one of them, they'd probably give you the right answer. By the way, Spike agrees on this. He talked about this when he was on my podcast, and I've talked to him about this, you know, privately. He really felt like that should have been right at the center of their campaign. But he also was the VP nominee and not the presidential nominee. And that's, you know, I think you don't get to shape the priorities in the same way. I think if Spike Cohen had been the presidential candidate, that would have been much more of a priority. What else? What is the messaging? Because, you know, the Mises Caucus is kind of feeling its oats after a variety of meltdown among the National Committee, or, you know, the president, or whatever he is, the chairman of the LP National Committee. What are the central thrusts of a Dave Smith style libertarian party? Well, the most important thing is to address the crises that are facing the nation right now, not to focus on our philosophy or all of the abstract avenues that you can go down, which libertarians, I think, love to do way too much. And I know it's something that you've talked about many times, like you're just not interested in these, should we privatize the sidewalk debates or whatever. And I understand that. I think that what we should, from my perspective, I think that America is on a suicide mission right now. And we should be addressing the things that's killing the country. The major issues, the major evils that the government is doing and try to raise enough popular support to stop them. And so that would be, I mean, obviously, the COVID regime we oppose. But who knows where that's going to be in 2024? Hopefully, that's not around. That'll be an open wound, no matter what. I mean, that's definitely material to be worked. Yes, there will still be remnants of it, even in the best case scenario. So ending that, ending the wars, ending the militarization of the police and the mass incarceration state, ending the war on drugs, ending the corporate bailout state. And not just like the bailouts that we saw in 2020, but the perpetual state of billionaires on welfare, the Federal Reserve, easy money to these big banks, constant bailouts from the Congress, ending the worst things that the government does, the cronyism all throughout the economy. And so that's, and these are issues that you can really get large popular support on. These are very unpopular things, and they're the things that are killing the country. So all of those things, I think, should be right at the forefront. Those should be the major issues. And in the same way that when Ron Paul ran in 2008 and 2012, his great moments with Rudy Giuliani or any of those debate moments, it was never him explaining the non-aggression principle to people. It was him explaining the crises that the nation was going through at the time and why it happened, what was causing it, and what the solution is. That's what the Libertarian Party should be there for. If we do that, we'll be taken seriously. If we have a debate where people are, you know, or a convention where people are stripping and having debates about driver's licenses and stuff like that, then we'll be viewed as the joke. And that's the state we're currently in. So let me follow up on that. At one point you talked about how no revolution, and you were talking, you know, partly the Ron Paul revolution, which of course was in the Republican primary. He did not do particularly well as a Libertarian Party candidate. In 1988, he got 431,000 votes, or half of a percentage point. But you said no revolution will succeed unless it's based around love. Can you can you kind of expand on that? Well, I think that you have to, that Libertarians particularly, but just in general, that you have to let people know that we're not, you know what, the knock on Libertarians, right, is like this kind of, oh, you care about profits more than you care about people, or that you just want to not pay taxes. It's the brand thing, your self, the virtue of selfishness. Which, you know, Rand wrote some really great stuff, but I think she did not do us any favors in that department in kind of playing into that stereotype. And that's just not really, at least from my perspective, what drives me to be a Libertarian. I mean, I'm a Libertarian because I care about and see how states destroy human lives, slaughtering people, imprisoning people, financially ruining people, destroy families, destroy prosperity. And so it is our love for, you know, other people and our humanitarianism that drives us to be Libertarians. So that's kind of what I meant about that. Yeah. I mean, I think that's very attractive, you know, and a good way to put it. But it also seems that the Mises Caucus in general is constantly harping on people for being squishes, for being sellouts, for being cosmetarians, Beltway Libertarians, regime Libertarians, things like that. And, you know, two questions about that, because you also have said that, you know, what was great about Ron Paul is that he would coalition with anybody. I mean, he worked with people like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders and whatnot. So, you know, Ken Libertarians get along and you've pretty eloquently in a couple of speeches I've seen you give, you know, talk about how like, you know, we have to stop hating on each other first and foremost. But that's like what a lot it seems to be coming out of the Mises Caucuses at the state level. And I guess, how do you address that? And then the second question is, you know, is having a ideologically purified candidate, which seems to be the goal of the Mises Caucus, how does that play out in presidential elections? Because when you have cited people like Ron Paul and Harry Brown, these are people who never got more than half of one percentage point in a presidential race. Whereas, you know, such people as Gary Bake the Cake Johnson, you know, got up to 3.3% of the popular vote. And Joe Jorgensen, you know, we must be, you know, whatever it was, you know, affirmatively anti-racist got 1.2%. You got the second best, you know, showing in the popular vote. So I guess my question is, how do you get the Mises Caucus to love, you know, how do you give them a love potion number nine? Or is that necessary? And then, more realistically, you know, is being kind of ideologically, you know, extreme? I don't even know that that's the right word, but very rigid. Is that a pathway to mass success electorally? Well, okay, so there's a lot there. And I would refer to it as pure, rather than rigid. But I think that it's it's very well, I mean, it's very much like, no, you know, the problem isn't, you know, whether, you know, the problem isn't whether the Fed is doing the right policy. The problem is the Fed exists. You know, the sidewalk needs to be in private hands, you know, it's not so much the sidewalk thing. I mean, that wasn't Ron Paul's position. And I don't think anyone, you know, really cares about if we're ever getting to the point where we're having that conversation, me and you will both be very happy people. So I don't think we need to stress about, you know, I walk in the street anyway. So yeah, there you go. So that's either that when you walk in the street, it's either that you're scared of someone else or you're scaring someone else. There's no in between. So well, I would say this, and you know, I feel this way, because we've talked about this before and you were there when I debated Nick Sarwalk. But I think it's very misleading to or you're not going to get an accurate picture if you look at things the way you did when you laid out Ron Paul's vote totals in in 88, or Harry Brown's vote totals in the year 2000, or Gary Johnson's vote totals in the year 2016. Number one, because what obviously changed there, right, was the Ron Paul campaigns of 2008 and 2012 from within the Republican Party. And as you know, as well as I do, I mean, if you talk to any group of young libertarians, the overwhelming majority of them were brought in by the Ron Paul campaigns. This introduced libertarianism to more people than any other libertarian endeavor in my lifetime. And so of course, Gary Johnson inherited the benefit of that. And so and so did Joe Jorgensen. I mean, Ron Paul mainstreamed the term libertarian. And then the people in the libertarian party did better. There were also other factors like, you know, Trump and Hillary Clinton being the most intensely unlikable human beings who have ever sought that office actually measurably. So even polling data suggested this. And that's very different than say, Ron Paul running in 1988 from a third party that didn't have ballot access at all 50 states that didn't have the internet where you could reach a lot of people that way. Oh, Harry Brown did. Well, even Harry Brown with two unpopular candidates, right? George W. Bush and Al Gore. Not nearly as unpopular. Hold on. Well, let me just respond to that. Not nearly as unpopular and not the internet of today at all. And also George W. Bush was at the time running on so many of the good things. You know, this is coming off the Republican revolution in the house. This he's running on a non interventionist foreign policy, cutting spending, cutting regulation, cutting taxes. It was just a different time. Why wouldn't we pursue and by we, I mean libertarians, small L libertarians, why wouldn't we pursue the Republican party then, which is where Ron Paul really made all of his, you know, where he spent, that's the field he toiled. Well, well, so to answer that question, I just have to finish on the first part, which is that I also think we're in a flawed game if we're measuring by vote totals in a presidential election. Like I would not if if Joe Jorgensen, I mean, they didn't, but if Joe Jorgensen and Spike Cohen had led to a huge movement of libertarians, like say Ron Paul style, right? They get around that many votes, but there's this huge like level of interest and excitement in the movement. I would consider that far more successful than Gary Johnson's campaign, even if it got more votes. I mean, because both of them, it's not like either of them won, so more votes doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, it helps with ballot access and other things, but that aside, to me, the reason to pursue the libertarian party, I mean, if there was a Ron Paul type figure who was going to had a real shot at being the nominee of the Republican party, then like Rand Paul perhaps, right? But yes, and I was, I was, you know, excited about Rand Paul in 2016, but we all know how that went. And we all saw what happened to the party after Trump kind of took it over. And the truth is that right now, you're either, you're looking at a situation where it's either going to be Donald Trump again, the man who is responsible for continuing Obama's genocide in Yemen, or it's going to be DeSantis, Israel's best friend who basically thinks Donald Trump was right about everything as the presidential nominee. And there just is no Ron Paul there. Whereas in the libertarian party, we do have a chance to really get a great libertarian, somebody who can actually, you know, excite people, introduce these ideas to people, get on big platforms. We don't need the corporate press nearly as much as we used to. We don't need the debate stages as much. There are alternative platforms that are actually not the alternative platform anymore. Joe Rogan is bigger than anything on cable news. You know, these guys like Tim Pool and Dave Rubin and all these guys have humongous platforms that you can get on and speak right to the people. So we can, we can operate now from, from the libertarian party in a way that in Harry Brown's day and Ron Paul's day in the LP you couldn't. And so to me, that is the best thing that we can do. I don't think, you know, as I said in the debate with, with Nick Sarwalk, the idea of like trying to win the presidential election from the libertarian party is not a bad idea. I mean, sure, you want to win. But the only way that that's possible is if there was a mass movement and, and like tens of millions of Americans looked at politics in a radically different way. And the only way you do that is having somebody who's passionate and principled and excites people. So I don't care, you know, like to hear the fact that Ron Paul was a minarchist and not an anarchist is irrelevant, completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you're 100% perfect and rigid on every inch of libertarian philosophy. What matters is that you're right about all of the major issues that are killing the country. To talk about some of those issues, you've, you have said, and let me just pull it up here. Earlier this year, or I'm sorry, in January 20th, 2020, in a show, you said that one of the problems with libertarians is that they're basically not willing to take stands in culture war issues. And I'm quoting from the show, if you can't state a preference between a child being raised by a parent or being dumped in daycare, why should anyone take you seriously as a person? This is one of the things I've been stressing for years now. And it's something libertarians need to learn. Libertarians need to learn their cultural lesson or this whole movement is going to be in big trouble. It's not like families just decided they don't want to raise their children anymore. You had a second way feminist movement largely funded by the government. Is that the message in a cultural arena that you're going to bring to a libertarian presidential run? No, probably not. And I actually did a whole episode with Jean Epstein, where we went back and forth in this quite a bit. And so there's a lot there to unpack. But I think that the message that libertarians should have about the culture war is in terms of like a presidential campaign is that we're the only ones who have an actual solution to the culture war, which is to call it truce. And that I think that the culture war essentially is driven by the size of government and that as government gets bigger and bigger, everything becomes more and more political. And then everybody has to fight over who gets the power and rules over the other side for the next four years. So I'm happy to talk about it in terms of we can actually call it truce and just say, listen, if some people want to live the most conservative lifestyles and other people want to live the wildest lifestyles, then that's fine. And they should all be allowed to do that. But I do think that there are certain, let's just say there are certain cultural norms that are being crammed down the throats of the American people, primarily by the biggest statists amongst us that are pretty damn incompatible with liberty and that, yeah, we should be willing to fight against those. What are those then? More the idea that any disparate outcome is proof of systemic discrimination. I think that is incompatible with libertarianism. The idea that that, you know, which is something that a lot of libertarians, Thomas soul and Milton Freeman had been, you know, raving against, raving, had been, you know, railing against for, you know, decades well before I was born. There are ideas such as that, that are at their heart, if not designed, then they certainly always lead 10 out of 10 times to demanding state solutions. Is dropping your kid off at daycare one of those problems? I think that society that has parents raising their children is much more likely to be a culture that's compatible with liberty. Really? What is the, what's the evidence of that? Well, I mean, it's, well, I mean, the evidence of it is, I mean, you could just look all around us. I mean, I think it's everywhere. I don't know. Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton was, you know, born and raised in a two parent household. Yeah, no, I'm not saying it's a 100% fix on its own. I mean, it seems, I don't, yeah, you know, I'm just thinking like, isn't, you know, part of a libertarian or calling a truce in the culture wars then is not necessarily saying, oh, you know, you know, you know, this way of raising your kids is terrible. Or this way of living your life is terrible. I mean, for me, and I think there's a point of true disagreement among us is that, you know, the idea is, you know, as a libertarian is that you can live however you want. You don't have a claim on other people's time or attention or approval and certainly not their money. But I certainly wouldn't say that I have a claim on other people's lifestyles or that I can force them into one lifestyle or the other. But I can also notice reality and notice that the biggest governments always and intentionally undermine families, undermine communities, undermine churches, because if all of those forces are gone from society, then people become dependent on the state and the state ends up essentially becoming those forces in people's lives. So again, I just think it's libertarians can have whatever cultural preferences they want to, as long as you don't want to enforce it on others, then you're a good libertarian. Immigration is an issue that when I kind of joined the libertarian movement, when I, you know, went on staff at reason 27 years ago, something, immigration like almost every libertarian I knew was essentially, if I don't know that anybody was open borders per se, but everybody was like, we should have more, we should basically anybody wants to move here and live and work legally should be allowed to that seems to be a, you know, a very controversial position, certainly in the Republican Party, somewhat in the Democratic Party and increasingly in the Libertarian Party, you've talked about how that vision of immigration is problematic because of a wide variety of existing government programs. How do you deal with that from, you know, specifically libertarian kind of perspectives? Well, I think it's almost like the way I look at it is like, well, obviously, you know, I'm an Ann Cap. So like an ideal situation. What is the difference, by the way, between an anarcho-capitalist and a libertarian in your mind? I don't think there is any difference. I think we are libertarians, and I think we are libertarians taken to its logical conclusion. Okay, but are all libertarians Ann Cap's? No, no, no, I think there's libertarians like yourself who minarchists, I guess, would be a decent term that constitutionally like a night watchman state. Yeah, sure. I think libertarianism is an umbrella term for all of those things. But so in a way, it would kind of be to me, almost like, and I've talked about this a lot on my podcast where it's kind of like having a preference of what should be abolished in what order. So I think it's completely reasonable for a libertarian, let's say, who thinks that welfare should be abolished, that we should abolish the welfare state to, let's say, in the middle of the lockdowns of 2020. And you were going to say, we're going to abolish all welfare right now to say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, you have to abolish the lockdowns first, and then abolish welfare, because you can't abolish welfare payments while you're not allowing people to work and take care of themselves, right? Like, I think that seems reasonable, that if working is illegal, then, and they're on welfare, we want to make it legal to work first, and then we can talk about abolishing the welfare. Where does, yeah, where does immigration fit in on that? I think that having open borders today would be a disaster. Now, there's very smart people who disagree with me on this, and I know, you know, Brian Kaplan to name one, I mean, there's very smart people who believe that things would be better off if we had open borders right now, even with all the other policies. I disagree with them. I think it would be a disaster. I think that what we should, like my preferred preference, or my priority in order would be abolish the war on drugs, and then start chipping away at the welfare state as much as you could. I think that is what's causing the vast majority of the problem with illegal immigration, and in terms of like the gangs coming over, coyotes bringing children over, I think a lot of this has to do with the black market and drugs, and this is how these gangs survive, and how they make money, and then this is what they ultimately, it's so much of the drug use in America comes from over that border, and that's because, you know, we have this prohibition on drugs, we'd be much better off without that. In terms of like, you know, complete open borders, I think that there are, and probably a lot of this changed with Rothbard changing his mind in the 90s on this issue, that I think there are, you know, there are strong libertarian arguments on both sides of that issue, and I think that they're open borders. But I mean, but is that, I mean, do you believe that people coming over, that the people coming over now are not suited to freedom or to liberty? No, I don't. Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, just, you know, no, no, I don't believe that at all. So what's the, what's the issue with them? Well, I don't think that there's an issue with them per se. I mean, I think there's an issue with our system. I mean, I don't know, you know, I think in many ways, Mexican and South American immigrants to this country are, I'd rather have them running things than most of the Ivy League college educated people in our country right now. So it's nothing against them personally. But from a libertarian position, if the government, you know, steals from the American people, which is, you know, taxation being theft, and they take this money from the American people and build roads and enforce the border and all of this to then open the borders to me is no real more or less libertarian than closing the borders in the sense that the people are being robbed. They're not allowed to make the decisions on how their property is being used. Now, I don't think, I think holding people in, in, in these, you know, detention centers or cages or whatever you want to take it, call it is completely inhumane. I'd be completely against doing that. I think that would you do. Well, I mean, this is right at the end. It's always guys with guns putting people in cages. That's right. And so what you would want to do is end the war on drugs and end the welfare state. You want to have not this is what's going to do a lot to create an environment where there's no black market money to be made for drug dealers and criminals to come through. And there's also no welfare magnet to draw people in for the wrong reasons. And you're not robbing the American people asking them to subsidize immigrants. The, I mean, it's, it's kind of hard to, the whole idea of the, the welfare magnet is, you know, 100 years old, even before there was the contemporary welfare state. And it's not fully clear to me. I mean, you know, immigrants tend to use welfare programs at much lower rates than native born people. Then it becomes, how are we defining welfare? What, what, yeah, what parts of the welfare state would go first? You know, in the eventual, and I would vote for you. I'll say that right now that day presidency. Well, listen, I mean, this is now we're getting far ahead of ourselves. But look, ideally, only by three years, you know, yeah, there you go. Well, I would ideally want to abolish all public schools. I mean, that would, I mean, solve a huge amount of the problem. And I, I'm not sure, but I would imagine that that's probably the biggest single largest, although a lot of the kids who go there, children of immigrants are actually American citizens. So would they technically are? Sure, but either way. But that's, that's again, just how the state is defaming people away. I mean, I don't care about any of those distinctions. I'm just saying that that is a huge chunk. I mean, if you have, what is the national average of something like $11,000 per student per year? I mean, if an immigrant comes in and has four kids, they're now taking, I mean, 40 grand a year out of the system. The odds that an immigrant is putting that much into the system are not right away. Although most Americans are probably, you know, are, are not drains. Yeah, we're $30 trillion in debt for a reason, you know, like, yes, of course, there's, there's, these are problems with statism, not with individual people. Talk about the war on drugs, you know, we should get rid of the war on drugs, you know, we should legalize all drugs. Do you use, do you use drugs? No, not anymore, not anymore. Not anymore. Okay. Oh, well, I mean, will you consider a drug? I mean, I like, I like, I enjoy a cocktail. So yeah, sure that now I don't smoke weed though. I used to. What, what changed on that? Um, I guess I just, I had kids, you know, and then we're had a kid and another kid on the way, and it just wasn't like, I didn't just want to be high and zoning out anymore. And I wanted to be kind of present with my daughter. And it just, I just stopped. And, and then when I stopped, I stopped when I think it was early when my wife was pregnant. And then I just, just liked it a lot better. I just kind of felt like I was sharper and had better like a memory recall. And I just didn't go back. But nothing against it. I got a lot of friends to smoke pot, nothing against it. Yeah. I mean, all drugs are somewhat on a similar plane, right? Where I mean, people should be able to choose their intoxicant, but then they have to be responsible for whatever comes out of that. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I don't know that they're all on the same, the same plane. I mean, there are some hardcore drugs that are a lot more serious than, than other drugs. Although I do think, you know, I remember there's like a couple of years ago, I had to give blood, I think just for like a checkup, like I just hadn't had blood work done in, you know, 20 years and my wife is like, you have to go like, what are you doing? And I couldn't drink coffee before I went. And it wasn't till like noon. And I mean, whew, you may not realize you're addicted to coffee, but like, try not having it till noon. It really, you know, so anyway, my main problem with the war on drugs is not just the, I mean, I guess first and foremost, it's just to me, it's evil. I mean, like on the level of slavery, evil to enslave a person because they put something in their body and did not do anything to anyone else or evil to enslave them because they sold something to someone to put in their body. I mean, I think it is on the level of slavery. I don't see why that is any more or less evil than enslaving someone because of some immutable characteristic. It's either way, it's they didn't do anything wrong and you're putting them in chains and throwing them in a cage. But on top of that, just practically, I mean, it is almost impossible to calculate the damage that the war on drugs has done to the country. Look, it is the, the reason why there is still any racial issues in our country today. The by far main reason is the war on drugs. It is the reason why so many young Black and Latino men in this country feel that the system is still racist because the dogs just, they're like, hey, if you guys didn't hate us so much, why won't you call these dogs off us? Like, why do I have to live under this if you guys didn't hate us? And it's the reason why there's still so much prejudice that persists from white people toward Black people because they go, well, look at these high crime neighborhoods. I mean, they're so violent. Whereas the reality of the situation is that all of this inner city violence is created by the Black markets or at least fueled, greatly exacerbated by the Black markets. And it's like a, dude, it's a goddamn tragedy, man. We all, you know, you, you walk like I was on the train, going to DC, a train you've taken probably a million times. You took a government train. You took a government train. Was it in a cellar, Dave Smith? Did you? It was. It was an excella. Yes, it was. Oh my God. But how many, but look, I know. This will come back to haunt you. Well, you used to live down there, right? I did live in DC for a while. And so you've taken that train a million times, right? I usually, I take the cheap one, but I see you as society types on the excella. I'm sure that reason Coke Money gave you a couple of excellas in your day. But if you, when you go over Baltimore on the train stop, I mean, what you look out and see is like, I mean, it's like a war torn, like, I mean, you're talking about houses that are completely just like falling apart, boarded up, little kids in bare feet playing around. I mean, go drive through Camden, New Jersey, go drive through, you know, fly over Camden. If you're there, don't stop. If you drive to Fillory and come back. I mean, it is, there are these pockets of this country all around that are basically third world countries within our country. And it's just, it's a tragedy. I mean, there's like kids growing up like this. And I think I agree with you that in a non-insubstantial way, you know, that these, this is the outcome of a 50 year war on drugs or a 100 year war on drugs. However, you want to start the clock on it. There's other, you know, factors in there too. I mean, there's certainly, I think the welfare state has contributed to this. I think the war on guns has contributed to this as well. And racism, right? I mean, institutional racism. Yeah. I mean, well, if you call these things, this gets into almost like a definitional, you know, like argument. But what is not causing these things is that some white people made like some white guy made an off-color joke or that some white guy has written, you know, some bigoted thoughts. What's causing this are real policies that are destroying real people's lives. And I think- Well, and also what I would say is historically, and I think this is worth, you know, libertarians bringing up, you know, what, what the way the war on drugs has worked over the past 100, 120 years as you identify an outgroup, typically an ethnic group, Negroes with cocaine or with reefer Mexicans with weed with, you know, that's when it started being called marijuana, LSD with kids, you know, with hippies and things like that. You demonize them and you, you know, but that's, that is a function of one of the ways that American culture works. And the drug war, whether or not everybody in it is explicitly racist, it works to perpetuate you know, a case system, which is not good and ends up with cities like Camden. Yeah. Yeah. No, I completely agree with you. And I think people would be blown away by how much of a miracle it would be if you were to abolish some of these policies, much like when prohibition was abolished and the murder rate just like drastically declined. I mean, I think just life would get a lot better for a lot of those communities. And I think racial tensions would be much better in America. I agree. I mean, to the extent that racial tensions, you know, were set off certainly during COVID and in, you know, with the George Floyd case and going back to the earlier teens with Michael Brown, which is a very different situation than I think the George Floyd one for a number of reasons, but it's about the intersection of police and minorities is like that's always the match. And yes, completely. And then I think like what is frustrating as a libertarian to see is that then, and I do think to some degree, this is by design, that then everyone gets thrown into these distractions and we're talking about Aunt Jemima or we're talking about this kind of like, do we live in a white supremacist society or not? And whereas what we should be focused on really are the issues that matter. And this right, both Justin Amash and Rand Paul had great bills in Congress. And it's like, we don't need to have conversations about how racist we are as a country. We don't need to have conversations about who played Appu on the Simpsons or Aunt Jemima. We need to end the war on drugs, end no-knock raids, end qualified immunity, end civil asset forfeiture, like focus on the things that actually matter, the policies that really solve these problems. Can I ask as kind of a final question or topic, so where the Libertarian Party now like 100,000 plus members, it got 1.8 million, 1.7 million votes in 2020. If the party exists to run candidates on some level and you're going to see a surge in votes for the Libertarian Party, you're going to see a swell of interest in Libertarian ideas. Where do you think, what are the audiences that are just sitting there waiting, patiently at home on a Friday night by the phone waiting to be asked out? Where does the growth for both a small L Libertarian and a capital L Libertarian kind of resurgence or surge come from? Well, I think there's several different groups that you're probably more likely to have success with than others. Not to say that you shouldn't try your best and also different people might be better at having success with different groups. So there's some people that are for whatever reasons are going to be better at talking. I'd say a Brooklyn Jew, you obviously are going to touch the hearts of southern whites particularly strongly, right? Well, right. Yeah, evidently. I don't know. I'm an exception, I think, to the rule there. People who are the sons of the Confederacy like Dave Smith. It's a natural commonality, whereas Justin Amash is going to be somebody different. There is something, there's a real irony in there. There's something really funny about that. But I would say what is, what my guess would be, certain different groups, I would say. So I think on the left, broadly speaking, I think Bernie Sanders supporters and Tulsi Gabbard supporters, people like that who have been completely screwed over by the Democrats and are at least at their core anti-establishment, anti-war, anti-chronism. I think there are, again, not that we're going to win them all over, but that those are some people to talk to. On the right side, there's certainly the real deal fiscal conservatives who are disgusted by the fact that George W. Bush and Donald Trump were the two biggest government presidents in, well, removing Obama and now Biden. Besides them, the two biggest government presidents are history. They're like the Beatles. The 20th century, the four presidents we've had are just terrible. I also do think that there's an opening amongst Trump supporters who were just supporting him as a big middle finger to the whole establishment, who are disgusted with how much the elites have screwed them over. I think that libertarians' role is to explain to them that their enemy is not really China or Mexico, nearly as much as it is the Federal Reserve and the Wall Street Casino and the politicians in D.C. But I think there's opportunity there. I think there's opportunity for Biden supporters who were really, truly did believe in whatever the criminal justice reform or something like that. I mean, there's potential in these groups all over the place, but I do believe in the kind of Ron Paul notion that you don't have to change your message to all of these people. You can kind of have one consistent cohesive message. The best thing about libertarians is that we're better liberals than the liberals and we're better conservatives than the conservatives. Scott Horton, who I love, always says that. It's like when it comes to the issues that the liberals are best on, we're better than them on those issues. When it comes to the issues that the conservatives are best on, we're better than them at those issues. I just think that if it's presented the right way and articulated the right way, you can generate a lot of interest. I would say that if nothing else, Ron Paul did prove that you can generate enthusiasm and interest and excitement from millions of people by preaching a pure libertarian message and talking about the issues that really, really matter. Like the wars, the Federal Reserve, the boom bus cycle, the destruction of our currency, the militarization of the police, the mass spying apparatus, the whole national security state, all of that stuff. And I think right now there's a really big opening to talk to people about it. That sounds great to me. It's a good note to end on. I want to thank Dave Smith. He's on Twitter at Comic Dave Smith. You've got, would you list your podcasts for us, sir? Oh, sure. And let me just say that I very much appreciate that I was a little bit upset by the round table discussion of me last week. But literally, the day after I tweeted it, you reached out to me and were like, well, hey, why don't we come on here and have this conversation? So I really appreciate that. And I've always, every one of our conversations, even the one like on Thaddeus Russell where we were arguing more than that. One of the things I always like loved about you is that it gets, it'd get like real heated while we were arguing. And like the second the show is over, you're like, Dave, I'm buying beers. Come on over to the bar. And that I've always really enjoyed currency, Dave. Come on. Well, that is that is not like I'm swimming in Bitcoin. That's okay. Very good. But I always enjoy our conversations. So thanks for having me. Part of the problem is my political podcast, Legion of Skanks is the comedy podcast. And then yeah, at Comic Dave Smith on Twitter. Alright, we'll leave it there. Dave, thanks very much. Thank you, Nick.