 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds on reason. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Just Asking Questions, which is also our first in-person episode since my co-host Liz Wolfe and I live about 800 miles away. And we are pleased to welcome, as our very first guest, podcaster extraordinaire, Dave Smith. Dave, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be on the first episode. Well, we wanted to have you on the first episode because it kind of sets the tone for what we want to do, which is to engage people who are like, I don't know, 70%, 80% in agreement with us, but then also explore. That's like, I feel like that's a good starting place where we have enough common ground where we don't have to quibble about like the biggest picture questions, but we can really get down into the details about some of the finer points. So we're very grateful to have you here today. Oh, my pleasure. So for our first question, I want to open this up to everybody, but we will obviously give our guest of honor the chance to answer first. What is a libertarian? What beliefs are disqualifying for libertarians to hold today? Well, I would say, to me, libertarianism is the belief in self-ownership, private property rights, and the non-aggression principle. To me, I think that's the best philosophically sound definition of it that isn't circular. You know what I mean? That it's not just like a definition like, well, it's someone who believes in freedom or maximum freedom or something like that. So a libertarian would be someone to me who believes in that. And I would argue that almost everyone who calls themselves a libertarian, whether they would agree with my definition or not, whenever they're arguing for a libertarian position, it's completely consistent with all of that. Now what beliefs are disqualifying to you is tough to quibble about, because I don't know, look like Gary Johnson wanted to legalize pot, but not any other drugs or not any harder drugs. Please explain to me how you think that legalizing marijuana straight through to heroin can possibly be a harm reduction forum. It makes no sense to me. We are not espousing the legalization of any drugs outside of marijuana. I'm not going to say he's not a libertarian, but I would say he's not a libertarian on heroin, if that makes sense. Right? Like that's just, it's completely contradicts what libertarians believe. So I don't know exactly. I probably, there are probably some issues for me that. He seems pretty blissed out. Like he might have been on heroin, who's to say? Yeah. No, I think it's just a lot of edibles, but I don't, I don't know for sure. And so I don't know, you know, everybody says like, you're not a real libertarian to every other libertarian. So I try to just not get involved in that. Although I will say there are certain things probably, you know, like to me war and peace is the biggest issue and people who support wars, I really do not consider them libertarians. I just think that it's like, if you are for freedom and against the government, there is no worse government policy in the world than war. There's not even a close second and that, you know, that's, you know, tends to violate more freedom than any other policy. Where do you encounter those libertarians, though? Well, where are the pro war libertarians? Where are they hiding? Well, I mean, if you, if you want to listen to, you know, Ted Carpenter, who just left Kato gave like a 45 minute speech on this of how much there is in some of these, like, you know, libertarian, you know, organizations. I just had a debate with the Austin Peterson, who was, was a LP candidate for the president years ago. Yeah, I mean, I think they're out there. Certainly during the during the Ukraine war, there were a lot of people who called themselves libertarian, who were very quick to say you're, you know, a Putin propagandist for for bringing up, you know, the fact that us, you know, giving a blank check to this war has done nothing but kill hundreds of thousands of people. So there they exist. But there can be wars that libertarians would support. Yes, we agree with that. OK, yeah, just not any in modern. Yeah, no, like, yeah, I think the American Revolutionary War would be a legit. Yes, if you're invaded by an army, you have a right to violently try to get them out. That's but not too many of those, not too many of those recently. Yeah, I mean, that's where it starts to you put the nonaggression principle at the center of libertarianism. And that's where it starts to get a little murky for me, because I think that there would be legitimate wars of self-defense. But how would you square that ever with the nonaggression principle because there are always going to be casualties that, you know, collateral damage? Well, I mean, if you're if there's an invading army, I think that by definition they are the aggressors. And then I think it's reasonable. Like, if you're saying am I going to split hairs down to the point that like this other soldier in that, you know, uniform hasn't fired a shot yet. So is he I would say, yes, he's fair game. You've rolled in with an invading gang. You've you've, you know, given up your rights. I mean, the nonaggression principle doesn't mean you see your right to self-defense, right? But that can sometimes, depending on the specific situation, that can be really difficult to suss out in the moment. Well, with the Ukraine-Russia war, for instance, the libertarian type people who were siding with Ukraine in that war saw Ukraine as repelling an invader. I presume your objection to that is more so America's involvement, not necessarily the Ukrainians, right? Oh, no, I mean, I think to be clear, I think the Ukrainians have a right to self-defense and they have a right to stay and fight for their territory, if that's what they wish to do. But that's there's a lot more to that picture than that's just what's going on. And yeah, like my problem was not just my problem was American involvement and NATO's involvement going way back for for decades that, you know, this intentional policy of like trying to to needle the Russians over and over again. And then finally being like surprised when it resulted in this. But I would say that, you know, there's I. So this is removed from any moral feeling about this. The Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves. But you also like if someone pulls a gun on you and asks for your wallet, you have a right to fistfight that guy. It's not necessarily a good idea. And so that's more been my thing with Ukrainians, like you're fighting a fight. You can't possibly win. This was, you know, like this was blasphemy to say this for the last couple years. But now everybody's come around to acknowledge that even with the blank check from America over these two years, they just have no shot of winning. So now we're right back to negotiating time. And and yeah, I'd be against, you know, Americans being forced to fund a war, which both armies are being forced to fight because these are two conscripted armies after all. So that's there's nothing libertarian about that. I think that with one realm where it starts to get complicated here for me is that the when you're talking about what is the role of America's military? And I think that you and I share a sort of libertarian genesis in that we were I became a libertarian a few years before Ron Paul made his run. But the Ron Paul's 2008 run was certainly energizing for me and what really got me deep into libertarianism. And that, you know, it was the first time I'd heard about the concept of blowback and so forth. And so it was very formative for me, as I know it was for you. However, there are times when it it seems as if some libertarians, they almost their analysis is almost which side is America not funding? And that is the side that's who's who we are going to back. And so I see in the Ukraine-Russia war, there is some some of America's self there is a self interest for America's defense to make it costly to Russia to invade and say, you know, you can't that that, you know, some level of stability and not, you know, escalating things towards or, you know, not giving a blank check for you to just march troops over borders. Is there not something to that? Like, can it can self interest expand beyond simply only if you are literally, you know, there's bombs on your soil? Can you offer any support whatsoever? Well, I mean, so in a way, like, if that's the thinking, which I do think is the thinking in DC, at least for the most for the most part. It's like there's a few things to that. Number one, so that if if, you know, putting some type of penalty on Russia for invading is in America's interest. Well, let's just be really brutally honest. Well, the cost of that is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives. So all right, that's if that's a cost you're like comfortable paying, fine. But like maybe take that Ukraine flag out of your Twitter bio because like you're really the most anti-Ukrain person. But then again, these grand plans, like, yeah, maybe it would have been in America's best interest if democracy had swept the region in the Middle East. And then they were all like Jeffersonian Republicans or something like that. But that plan doesn't seem to be working out too well. And all that it seems like, I mean, I think that, you know, like the US dollar is the reserve standard of the world is probably in more jeopardy right now than at any point in my lifetime. This has driven Russia and China to be much closer allies. You've seen kind of like a real almost almost a real crack to the unipolar world where it's not even clear that we really are in a unipolar world anymore. So I would say that, look, my perspective from the Russia thing is that obviously Vladimir Putin is he's wrong to invade and it's been the war's been horrific. I do think that not living in Libertarian universe, living in the real world and trying to have some type of reasonable modern expectations for what governments are going to do. That the idea that Vladimir Putin said for years, you cannot expand your military alliance to Ukraine. That is off the table. That is my red line. And they knew this. I mean, there's that great memo. If you've never read it, the NET means NET where the current CIA director privately writes to Condoleezza writes and is like, listen, this is for real. This is their red line. And there is just no way America would tolerate that. I mean, can you imagine if like if Russia was like, we're bringing Mexico into our military alliance? What do you think the reaction from Washington, D.C. would be like, absolutely, you are not. And we would send troops in there in a second if that was the plan. Then they right in his face kept telling him, well, yes, we are. Yes, we are. We're going to do it. They announced it at the Bucharest summit in 2008. Just before the war broke out. Condoleezza Rice, sorry, that's racist. Kamala Harris was over there saying, Kamala Harris was over there saying, we're still bringing NATO in. It's still the plan. And so I just think like there is no powerful country that would possibly have reacted different to this. So I don't, you know, that doesn't mean it's good or it's right. But my takeaway from that is like, why would we be so stupid as to keep doing this for no benefit other than like world domination? Yeah. And I think that pushing pushing NATO further and further in is certainly an escalating move. And I agree with you there. I guess the the the the bigger like philosophical question I'm trying to get to is like, so looking at as an example, looking at what just happened in Israel, what did the U.S. do, the U.S. sent in one of our largest aircraft carriers into the Mediterranean to prevent all these other players from getting involved. And I mean, the idea is to stop this from escalating into a regional war. That would seem to me to be in America's self interest to stop that escalation. And it's a relatively low cost of like, we're just going to park this carrier here. Would that fall within your definition of the conforming to the nonaggression principle? Well, I mean, no, not really. And it's certainly it's, you know, I'm a complete non-interventionist on all this stuff. So I don't support that. It's not like the most egregious thing the American military has ever done. Like I'm kind of on the scale of things to be outraged by. But look, that's just like you're looking at one tiny little element of this huge conflict and being like, well, look, this one thing here was done, you know, to that could prevent a wider war. But the whole thing only exists because the U.S. has been propping up this this status quo for for 60 years. And the fact that we think we're going to maintain this thing where we go, OK, well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to prop up Israel. We're going to, you know, make it so that the entire global community, which has been outraged about the treatment of Palestinians for since 1967, that we're going to whatever, you know, we'll veto everything at the U. N. We'll ignore all of these global human rights organizations. We're going to prop up dictators in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, and we're like that we're going to maintain this whole thing. And then when it blows up, the takeaway to me isn't like, well, you know, we do have to like, you know, sometimes prevent these wars from happening. The truth is that this none of none of any of this should be America's business. And if we're going to get in, you know, if you believe, and this is what like Ted Carpenter said in that whole speech about the where he was blasting Cato, that it's like, look, the idea, if you're anything that considers yourself a libertarian or it's your 70 percent of agree with me or whatever, that doesn't come with being the world empire. You don't have. There is no such thing as a restrained, a constrained constitutional republic that is also the empire of the world. War is the health of the state. War always grows government for other purposes other than just the war. And people always lose the most of their civil liberty. The civil liberties are lost the most during times of war. I want to get back on track a little bit, but I do think that there's, you know, these are themes that we were talking touching on in a recent stream where we interviewed Russ Roberts, who I think comes at this issue from a very different perspective than you do. But the thing that I wish more libertarians would grapple with is there is a difference between the aspiration of the role America plays and figuring out from where we currently are, what is the appropriate approach to get to where we want to be? Because we I think we can all recognize that like the US has been funding Israel and supporting Israel for a very, very long time. And I think many people, many good libertarians would say, hey, you know, it's long past time to cut Israel off and allow them to really stand on their own two feet. They have the ability to do that. But realistically, that's not something that we can do right now. Like we can't just fully cut off funding right now and expect there to be no awful ramifications that would stem from that. So the thing that I always struggle with with the vision that you're articulating is, OK, but how do you get from point eight to point B? Well, I don't know. I think I kind of reject the assumption that it would be some type of disaster if we were to cut off aid to Israel right now. I mean, this is kind of the same like thinking, yeah, I mean, look, it would put enormous pressure on them to negotiate that. That's really what they'd have to do. Look, Israel is not this isn't 1948. Israel isn't in a state of war with all the Arab surrounding nations. Which is the precise argument that many people make for why we should have at some point between 1948 and, you know, last year chosen to begin to sort of cut them off from U.S. funding and so forth, right? Like there. But but then there's a certain symbolic like if we do that right now, surely that does have ramifications beyond, you know, what they would have been had we done that in 2019. Well, I know I agree. It has ramifications, but I'm just saying that like they might be very positive. Like there's look, Israel has been at peace with Egypt since the 1970s. They're at peace with Jordan. They're at peace with Saudi Arabia. All of the they they bomb Syria constantly. They've never serious never response to them. They're just allowed to. It's not even like an issue. Iran might funnel some money to Hamas, maybe some to I'm sorry, Hezbollah and some to Hamas. That's it's not as Israel, if they didn't have the backing of the United States of America would be heavily incentivized to actually deal with the Palestinians, to actually work out a real peace process, not this pretend one to grant them their independence, stop occupying their areas because they look a lot of these things, right? Like with Zelensky and now with Netanyahu, part of why they're so willing to be so provocative is because they know they have the baddest bully in the world that has their back. And if they didn't, they might be like, OK, well, look, we really got to think about this. Maybe we shouldn't just bomb the hell out of Gaza right now because that might actually piss off the world. You know, and so like there's this tremendous moral hazard that we create when we as the strongest country in the history of the world are like, we have your back, you know. And I have to say that I agree with you in the to the degree that when I see these images, you know, Israel is having they're making very tough moral choices right now and they're making choices that I don't always agree with and to have us funding or, you know, being perceived to be joined at the hip with every bomb that they're dropping is a very bad situation. So I would like to see us get disentangled. On the other hand, I think that at the moment they have moral, they have some moral, basically, they have my moral support in terms of pursuing Hamas and doing everything they can. That's not a war crime to root out Hamas to the degree that that's possible. So I think that to some degree if the less entangled that the US got with Israel, the more aggressive we might actually see Israel get in in some in some way. And that's something that we might have to get comfortable with if we seriously want to disentangle with our allies. I don't I don't think there's reason to believe that Israel is going to really take the gloves off if America stops backing them. I think it would be much more reasonable that they would, you know, that they would be more concerned coming from a slightly more vulnerable position. But, you know, look, Israel Israel won a war in 1967 and they've been holding these people ever since and they just don't have a right to do that. You mean the West Bank? The West Bank and Gaza. There's that that's when they took control of all of Palestine. Yeah, but it is worth noting also that the situation in Gaza has changed in the last, you know, 16, 17 years. Oh, for sure. But I'm just saying the situation is quite different than the West Bank one. Yes, absolutely. But I'm just saying like they won a war in 1967. They have literally not granted these people their independence since then. They then, OK, if you want to talk about what's happened over the last 15 years or so, they then went on a stated intentional. They took on an intentional goal of supporting Hamas specifically so that they could never get their independence. So they could never get their state. And you can read it all, you know, Scott Horton and Conor. Every time you mention Scott Horton on the show, we all have to take a drink. OK, fine. Well, look, I'm just saying they have a great piece up at antiwar.com. And you can just it's like read them and weep. These are in their own words, Benjamin Netanyahu and all types of top government level people saying this is our plan. And for this reason, we are going to support Hamas because no one will ever grant them statehood as long as Hamas is in control. But Hamas has agency in this too, right? Of course, of course. But I'm just saying, of course, like Netanyahu also, like these actions are not like widely supported by these really people. Like I'm not. Yes, these are governments. This is a Hamas is a criminal gang. You're making a case that this really government airs and fucks up in a million ways. I totally know. I'm just saying like coming at it from the point of view of being like, oh, well, listen, I do kind of root for them and they do have the moral right to do this. It's like, yeah, but we're talking about the guys who had an intentional policy of propping up this terrorist organization to use them so that they could never grant the Palestinian people who just like the Israelis are separate from their government so that they could never grant those people their own independence and autonomy. And then it blew up in their face. And now they're like freaking carpet. But all right, I don't know. People don't like that term. But they are. Have you looked like the numbers like they've dropped more bombs than we did in a year in Afghanistan on Gaza over a few weeks. And so no, I don't look at that situation and go like, oh, well, they do have like the moral right to root these people out. It's like, yes, like the people who did October 7th all deserve to die. OK, but I'm sorry. When your plan was to prop up a terrorist organization so that the people in Palestine never get their autonomy. And then you use that as an excuse to then just start slaughtering them. Dropping up a terrorist organization in a vacuum, right? Like there were multiple competing factions of, you know, Palestinian groups that were all going to create a worse situation for Israel. And so to some degree, this was like a strategic choice to pick the craziest of them. But that was the reason it's not like they were picking between like there's one terrorist group and then there's two democracy loving you know, groups that will really take care of the people. I'm like, yeah, we're really going to like go for the terrorists and refer them. Right. Like it's not the choice was the Palestinian authority. How bad of a choice it was. OK, but the choice was between, say, like the PLO, say like Arafat, Arafat types who have literally are standing there saying we reject terrorism. We don't want to do that anymore. We want to come to the table. We'll accept 67 borders. We'll accept twenty two percent instead of the forty four percent that the UN partition plan even recommended, which that was BS because there was no reason they should have taken so little. They're saying we'll take the twenty two percent. We want peace. We don't know. I'm not they said this. I'm not saying they're perfect angels, but to choose between that and Hamas and to choose Hamas over that option. This isn't like, oh, we have a bunch of bad options. And so we got to pick one. This is like we have clearly better options. And we will pick the craziest one so that they look crazy to the world. It's frankly the exact same behavior as American voters, right? Like there's the craziest motherfucker theory of governance. I think that this was like, was it originally like a massive proposal? And it's like sometimes people simply want to vote for the craziest motherfucker in the room. And like that to some degree explains a little bit of the Trump phenomenon. I do want to stifle some of my greatest Zionist shill thoughts and move us back in the direction of actually answering libertarianism because I think we have established that libertarians aren't generally Warhawks and we are not generally Hamas shills or even Zionists. Zach, how do you look at this question of what is a libertarian defining yourself either in terms totally independent of Dave's or perhaps in response to Dave's? Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. Unsurprisingly, I see libertarians as extreme skeptics of state power. And the reason for that is that we are against violent monopolies and for voluntary association to the degree that that's possible. And that is because self-ownership. We believe in that idea that self-ownership, self-authorship, you control your own destiny, you write your own story. And, you know, the way I like to think of it is this this phrase, right to try, like you should have the right to challenge monopolies. And that is something I think libertarians across the board recognize that the state is a monopoly on violence and they use that monopoly to create other monopolies. Like we've got Elizabeth Warren and the like out there always talking about monopolies. I think she was just tweeting about a sandwich shop monopoly that she's going to break up, but the real monopolies are created by governments. And I think that for various we all have I think where where the difference the differences come in is that we have different reasons for thinking that monopolies are bad, but my reason for thinking monopolies are bad is because I believe that the experimentation and competition creates progress and prosperity. So that's my definition. I think I agree with both of the things that you guys said. And my definition is perhaps even simpler. This idea that libertarians don't look to the government to fix what ails us. I think libertarians ought to have and generally do have a high degree of comfort with voluntary action existing in civil society outside from government. Libertarians, I think, frequently gravitate toward voice. But also I love the strain of libertarians that gravitate toward exit trying to exist outside of government institutions. You know, I look at people living off the grid, people choosing to homeschool. There are so many ways that people can just kind of prove out the idea that we actually don't need the government to take care of us in a gazillion ways. We sometimes prosper far, far, far outside of the purview of the state. And in fact, people can be so much freer to live better lives that way. You know, obviously, like the non-aggression principle is, you know, pretty core to all of this. But I think libertarians dispositionally also tend to just be people who take incentives seriously and second order impacts, like unintended consequences. And I really appreciate how libertarians are so frequently asking this question of government policies. Well, what are the alternatives? Or what are bad incentives that could possibly be created by this? I love how libertarians focus on tradeoffs and it drives me absolutely insane that so much of the left and the right seem to, you know, never entertain the possibility that a government policy could actually lead to awful and unintended consequences. What do you think, Dave, does any of those do you jive with any of those or a disagreement? I mean, I pretty much agree with what you guys are saying. I mean, like I the definition I give, I think is like kind of to the core of the philosophical belief. But I agree with everything both of you guys said. And I just think that to me, the fundamental libertarian insight is that what the government is, is as you said, a monopoly on violence. I don't even know if that's the perfect way to say it. It's like it's because there are other violent people, right? So there's like there's criminals too. So it's not like what they have is they have a monopoly on the legal legal initiation of violence, right? So like they can do it legally. But that I think if you just look at things philosophically, like because this is what I agree with all the consequentialist stuff too. Like I think it's it's pretty obvious. Like you could look at South Korea, North Korea and be like, OK, what works to create prosperity here? It's not central control. But you mean it's not Potemkin grocery store. It's all fake fruit. Yes, turns out. But there's to me, it's like if you believe in morality at all, which almost everybody does. And there are some people who just rejected entirely, but almost everyone in the political realm, like if you listen to Bernie Sanders, he'll say it's it's it's immoral that there's this incoming equality. And, you know, if you listen to clear where they're getting it from, but they do have some sort of nature, they said. But if you believe there is such thing as right and wrong, then I would say inherently that has to be like morality has to transcend what human beings, what organizations we create. So like in other words, like if you think like if you think murder is wrong and you you were on a desert island or of some you know, uninhabited land and there's no government and there's no rules and someone murdered somebody, that would be just as morally wrong there as it is here. There just doesn't happen to be a legal system or police or whatever. But the morality of it kind of has to be the same. Otherwise, we're not really talking about morality. And so look, if any other group of people did what the government does, we would know what to call it right away. You would just be like, oh, this is the mafia or this is a criminal or this is, you know, like taxation is theft or you're just forcing someone to give you their money. You know, wars are mass murder campaigns. Like all of this stuff, if you if anybody else, any other group of people decided like we deem ourselves the regulators and we're going to go around and start regulating these businesses. You'd be like, oh, no, you're a gang, like you're a criminal organization. And so if you believe in morality, I think it has to be the same whether government does it or not. And that voting doesn't somehow change the moral characteristics of what a group of people do. Right. The only the issue that I have with being too moralistic about it, though, is that we don't know if the absence of this, you know, legitimate monopoly on violence is a stable situation. Like it's something that is yet to be seen. I mean, I'm open to the possibility that everything could be privatized one day or something. But I, you know, it's got to be that's why I favor this definition where it's a little bit more experimental and you're saying, let's try to do not have the state do this thing that we're all used to the state doing. OK, fair enough. And I'm not even like, I don't want to, you know, do like a whole anarchy versus anarchy thing because I just in today's day and age, it's like seems so crazy because we're so far from both. But like, so then what is the if you're like completely against monopolies and you recognize that monopolies like just lead to these terrible results? So why is it that it's just like whatever these like five most crucial of things? Like, why is it just like writing laws and courts and police and military or things like that have to be run by a monopoly? Like, why is it? Because it seems to me like if we're saying that monopolies, especially violent monopolies are really bad at producing things, then why would it be like they're really bad at producing things in every other field? But the most important things must be run in the worst way to produce things. Otherwise, we'd all live in a dystopia. Yeah, I'm not really sure. All I can say is that it's not that I like I like the theory, but I like the theory to be bolstered by the empirical reality. So I like to see it play out and kind of proceed with caution because kind of what the situation that you see when there's an absence of a state is often it creates a power vacuum and then something worse comes in. And so is that a stable situation? I mean, I'm interested in the experiments that are happening along these lines. You know, I did documentary about this place called Prospera in Honduras, where they're trying to privatize all the services. And I think maybe maybe at a very small like micro scale like that, it can work and prove itself out. It's just, you know, like you said, the practicality of even really discussing it at a larger level doesn't even lead anywhere. I think the answer is a little bit different. I like what you're saying, and you surely will not find this to be satisfactory or something, particularly earth shattering. But I do believe in a little bit of the sort of unique power of the U.S. Constitution and some of the structures outlined in it that I think, you know, many a liberal who did their sort of Trump hysteria op-ed piece and acted like American democracy was horribly imperiled during the Trump years don't place very much faith in our Constitution and don't place very much faith in our court systems or in federalism or in the abilities of this very complex system of checks and balances to actually serve has something that prevents, you know, the worst excesses of executive overreach. And I think we're libertarians, right? Like there are lots of things that we could sit here and point to and say, well, you know, executive overreach specifically when it comes to warm making powers. OK, that's something we absolutely oppose. And so surely the Constitution has failed us in X, Y and Z ways. However, with that massive caveat, I do think constitutional limits have done a pretty good job of ensuring some of these state institutions have actually done a decent ish, but imperfect job of serving their intended function. And I look to that as something that like the American system has, that many other systems don't and as sort of the best possible argument for the more limited government, libertarian view versus the ANCAP view. Well, I mean, if you want to look at how well and I'm not saying like there are examples here where like, you know, some unconstitutional policy has been struck down, you know, I mean, or things like that. But if you want to zoom out and just look at how good the Constitution has done it, limiting government, I mean, we're the biggest government in the history of the world and by far when and the biggest organization in the history of the world is the US federal government by any metric. And so I'm not saying I'm not arguing that this is a compelling argument to you. Yeah, no, but I'm just saying to anyone like like that. You guys were talking about how like it was the Ron Paul era that sort of, you know, radicalized you guys and sort of brought you to the libertarian cause for me, it was the Snowden revelations, because I'm about a decade younger than you guys in case it's not obvious. Fewer children, fewer wrinkles, a decade younger. But no, it was it was the Snowden revelations that really were the thing. I was already pretty libertarian and adjacent was sort of like a little bit of, oh, I kind of dislike liberal policies and I'm more interested in conservative policies, but hey, the drug war is really bad. And then it was the Snowden stuff that really drove home this idea of like, holy shit, like the government has just been spying on its citizens and none of us were really aware of this. And it began to make me pretty radicalized and interested in Fourth Amendment issues and also pretty passionate about the cause of like we need to ensure that whistleblowers have these first amendment protections to be able to, you know, they'll still frequently get tried for treason or have to flee the country, but whistleblowing is a really important public service. And I think that spoke a little bit to this like, you know, appreciation for dissidents, but also an appreciation for what we were able to learn and how we were able to become empowered with more knowledge of how our government was spying on us and lying about it. Yeah, and that that's the. So I can see that like. Yeah, but the flip side of that, the fact that we are able to get that knowledge out there is why I chafe a little bit at what the way you're characterizing it, Dave, because just saying that, you know, it's the biggest government in history doesn't really capture the fact that this is not the most tyrannical government in history or in modern. Also, how are you even characterizing? Like how are you even deciding that, right? Like, isn't the CCP arguably like way bigger in terms of like bureaucratic function and number of employees? And I mean, you got maybe someone could Google it real quick, but I would bet we have more federal employees in D.C. than they have. Can we even know that that I don't know for sure. But look, in terms of how much money it spends, how many bases it has abroad versus how many. I mean, I think it would be it would dwarf that. Now, to your point, North Korea is a much smaller government than us. But yeah, they're much worse to their own people. Right. However, again, you got to look at this thing in totality. If you're going to judge governments, you know, you don't judge them by how they treat the best of their people. You kind of, you know, like in the same way, if you were judging like a slave master and he had like 20 slaves who he just like viciously beat every day. But then he had another 10 that lived in the house, we treated pretty good. We don't go like, you know, you're judging him off of the worst of what he does. And so if you're going to judge America, you can't just judge America based on like, hey, it's kind of nice to live in Brooklyn. You know what I mean? Like you got to judge it on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen. You know what I mean? Like this is we've we've killed millions of innocent people just in the last 20 years. I'm not even going to go back to like Vietnam and all of this. Living in Brooklyn isn't nice. I don't know what you're talking about. I grew up there. It was nice. It was nice at that point. So this is really cool in the eighties and nineties, by the way. So this is this is this is this is foreign policy where we have a lot of agreement, but domestically, it's, you know, living in America is not living under tyranny by historical standards. Yeah, it's all like variations. Yes, but I agree with you. I'm not I'm not trying to paint a picture like, oh, you have a worse life here than you would living in any one of the, you know, like any like Muslim country or living in China or anything like that. I mean, China is probably like there are probably some people who have very good lives in China, but you don't really want to live like the average person does over there. So I'm not denying that. But I'm just saying if you're going to look at the American government, you kind of have to look at it in its totality and judge it by the worst. Like we don't judge the Soviet Union based off what like some guy who was like connected to the government who lived really well. You know what I mean? Like and there weren't people like that, but we judge them by what they did to the Ukrainians, right? But because because America has a flawed foreign policy to say the least, that does not justify throwing out all of the constitutional protections, all the pro-liberty aspects of the US government and saying, we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is where I think, you know, we butt heads a little bit with your camp. Name another country that has a better system of federalism, a better system of checks on executive power, better speech protections. Like like name the country that is hitting a lot of these categories consistently, much more than we are. That is operating at scale, my friend. Well, listen, maybe that's like maybe the goal should be a thousand Lichtenstein, you know, I mean, I said, I think. But no, take it take it a little more seriously than that, right? Like Lichtenstein isn't a good answer for me. Well, I mean, look, there's there's positive qualities that different different countries have. I don't know if you're going to go to court in any country, which country do you want to be doing that in? If you're, you know, being tried for a crime depends what you're being tried for. I mean, it's like it depends on the situation. You know, I don't think that there's there's probably lots of countries, even more primitively corrupt countries where you would probably be better off in certain in certain situations. I mean, like, you know, there's there's Eastern European countries where you could just pay a cop off when they stop you. Now, that we may look down at that, like, oh, that's so corrupt. But believe me, if you're if you're carrying around like weed in Texas or something like that, you'd wish you could pay that cop off. I mean, I have, in fact, been in the situation of carrying around weed in Texas and getting into some sticky terrain there. But I do think there's this interesting question of like not just like criminal offenses, but also like civil court, like, what about like enforcement of contracts and ensuring that you get a fair shake and the ability to resolve disputes? I just think it is important to give the US a little bit. You know, I hate to say, but to give the state a little bit more credit for the things that we are, we have actually very consistently for the last 300 years done pretty well. Let me pick up on the the thousand licked and shines point because that this is essentially the strategy of the Mises Caucus that took over the Libertarian Party at their decentralization project decentralization. We talked to Michael Heiss about it. I want to we're going to play a clip because Nick interviewed you and Reno during the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian Party in May 2022, and he asked you what you want to see the LP doing in the years leading up to the 2024 election, which we're now rapidly approaching. And this is what you said. I think we spark in the Ron Paul Revolution. I think that's the task right in front of us. I think if we're ever going to be like if we're ever going to get to to be a more free society, we need to have a lot more people who desire a free society. I don't think there's any path there without that. And the only way to do that is to inspire a lot of enthusiasm and energy, particularly amongst young people. So I think if we're playing the long game here, that's what matters the most. And the only way to do that is to actually stand for something and really introduce people to a radical new way of thinking about things. You know, you don't do that by running Bill Weld and saying, hey, this is the most boring, moderate establishment guy we could find to call himself a Libertarian. That's never going to be a game changer. And that's what we need here is a game changer. So do you think that the new Libertarian Party is poised to deliver a game changer? Well, I hope so. You know, look, it's with all these things like that's what I try to do, right? Like I'm always like trying to do that. I think that it was I think the Missus Caucus taking over the Libertarian Party was necessary for there to be a chance for the Libertarian Party to do that. We're still we're fighting a very uphill battle like anybody who believes in liberty is fighting an uphill battle. But perhaps more uphill now that the Missus Caucus is in power. Well, I would completely disagree. I mean, I think that, look, it doesn't matter. I mean, like, you know, you could say that there's like big donors have walked away from the Libertarian Party since they came in, which like several of them have. And that one in four members have also walked away. Well, OK, yeah. But look, I mean, the truth is that there was basically a civil war within the Libertarian Party and no matter what happened in Reno, believe me, if we if we had lost in Reno, we represented like 80 percent of the party. I mean, like tons of people would have walked away from the party, you know what I mean? So that's the the truth is that, say, when lockdowns came, the old Libertarian Party basically rolled over and took it and didn't want to say anything. And in fact, the only comments they would make would be like, well, we do think you should stay home. You know, like, yeah. Social distance or whatever. So you basically that we already it already deserved. If they're not even going to try to stand up for liberty, then I don't care if some big donors will support you and are alienated by us. Like and again, also the Joe Jorgensen campaign. I mean, there's like a total like embarrassment that she didn't. She was Joe Jorgensen would go to give speeches where a crowd full of people in masked were forced to be socially distanced in a park where a father had been arrested a week earlier for having a catch with his son and talk about the drug war or how socialism is bad or something like that and not even like not even want to touch the moment that she was living in. So in terms of like, can the Libertarian Party spark like the next Ron Paul movement? Well, no, not if it's doing that. It has no chance. Surely you believe in like, like, surely you are relate to the place that I'm in where I sort of, you know, have consistently looked at the political duopoly. And I'm like, nope, I don't have to vote for team blue and I don't have to vote for fucking team red either. And now I look a little bit at the former Libertarian Party and now the Libertarian Party has taken over by the Mises caucus. And I'm a little bit like, no, I don't have to vote for the hashtag where I'm asked Joe Jorgensen crew. I don't have to support them. But I also don't have to support the what was it? It was like the Uyghur genocide is fake and Ukraine is gay. Hashtag fake and gay. Like I don't know whether that was LPR, LPNH. But like surely, like surely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't mean to cherry pick, but I do think that that is somewhat representative of like the edge lordery memeing, trolling of the LP and the fact that they're trying what they perceive to be an edgier messaging strategy that I think, frankly, just moves a lot of people further away. And so I'm looking at these two options and I'm a little bit dissatisfied by both because I'm like, where's the actual representation of people like us, who I think are pretty reasonable. I think pretty pissed off about the COVID regime, pretty interested. I think a lot of us, I think we share a lot of similar values. And I think we want to see libertarian ideas win the day and be successful. And I'm not looking when I look at Angel McCartle and Michael Heiss and the Mises Caucus Takeover and Jeremy Kaufman. I don't really see champions for the things that I value. Well, all right. So first of all, I will say that like I hate the Twitter edge lording and shitposting and that stuff. I just hate it. I hate all of it. And I've been on record. I've been on record of this for years. But as far as I could tell, that's their entire strategy. Well, it does. Well, okay, but you're separate. No, there's one state affiliate in New Hampshire where that is their that is their entire thing. And they've been totally like basically at war with the Mises Caucus. Like, you know what I mean, like total. And so it's not as if like that's I would say that. I don't like there are also, by the way, there also are it's much, much better, much, much better. But there's also been like on the other side, like non Mises controlled, you know, state affiliates that do like a ton of this like kind of just engagement, farming, kind of shock value stuff. And I just don't like it. I just don't like any of that. Like to me, like what I always said was like what got people excited about libertarianism to me was Ron Paul given history lessons. Like this stuff is just lame. But I will say that because I don't know where you on that, you know, like the the as far as the Uyghur genocide thing goes, the State Department put out under Donald Trump, right? They put out in his like last year that just this announcement that there's a genocide going on in China. They the only source that they quoted was that Zenz guy whose numbers were completely wrong. And so I would certainly be like skeptical of like, listen, I might get if you're telling me a government's genociding some people like I'm listening, I hate governments. They do terrible things. I mean to say that the Chinese Communist Party is doing something. No, well, there's no question they're doing something bad. And they're a, you know, a brutal authoritarian, I think more fascistic really than communist government. But those Zenz numbers and I believe he even admitted them. This wasn't even like, oh, you have this interpretation. You have these like he didn't carry the four when he was supposed to and made it out like they're doing something that they're not the way. But I think there's a ton of space for people like all of us scrupulous truth seekers to look at the information that we currently have. Some of which is absolutely unreliable, right? Because it is very hard to figure out what goes on within the CCP controlled borders. I think it's very fair to look at these reports and try to suss out what is true, what is false, which numbers are inflated, which reports we ought to believe. ProPublica had a really good investigation of some of the surveillance regime that's used to control the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. I think it's very fair to like have those types of conversations. The way to do that is not to just be outright denialist and then to hashtag fake and gay, right? Like this is obviously like I said, I don't the fake and gay thing. Like I just I hate all this stuff. So I will also look, they'll say their argument is like, well, look, this blows up. This is the way to get a ton of attention on Twitter. And then they'll see our other tweet that's like defend the guard and like doing all this serious stuff. My thing is always like my calculation is like, I think you turn off way more people than that than that benefit is. But I've made that very clear privately to to those guys for years. I've done it publicly to them. So look, I'm not saying like none of this is none of this is perfect. And I wish I wish all libertarians would just shut up and do exactly what I tell them to do. But it turns out that's not how libertarians wire. So it doesn't it doesn't work. Well, so, I mean, in one sense, it sounds like what you're saying is, you know, there was this awful messaging that existed before this very out of touch messaging during just one of the most insane years in modern history. And so this new leadership came in. They came in pretty hot. They've dialed it back a little bit. I looked into some of the numbers coming into this. Some of these were compiled by their the Mises caucuses enemies, the classical liberal caucus, which but what they compiled here is that revenues are down historically when you adjust for inflation and not only big donors, but monthly donors are down. And I looked into the actual reports behind the numbers and it's all accurate, except the LP did not adjust for inflation, which seems like something you should do. Well, what do you mean raise prices? Like the raise the membership they're showing like in the LP reports, the revenue looks kind of like slightly up because inflation, but if you adjust for inflation, revenue is at historic lows. Yeah, but so what's the your takeaway from my takeaway is that revenues are down monthly. Yeah, but I mean, that's like, you know, that's like if you have a job where you're making 100 grand a year, and then you just keep your job and someone's looking at that and go like, dude, your your income is way down from there. I mean, yes, that's true. But that's I mean, if you're blaming the Federal Reserve, then I'm with you. But if you're blaming the Mises Congress, no, no, I'm saying the Federal Reserve and the Mises Congress. Okay, we're saying technically, I mean, usually when organizations measure their historic revenues, they would adjust for inflation. That's not true. It's like Coca-Cola puts out like earning statements. They're not going to adjust for inflation. Okay, but Coca-Cola isn't going like they'd be like, no, we took in three, we had three billion this year, 3.2. Okay, well, we'll leave it for the audience to judge whether that is a good or bad number. But what do you think is going on here internally? Well, I mean, just to be clear, like, I'm not, you know, I have no position in the libertarian party. And like, if you talk to like Angela or someone like that, I'm sure she could give you a much better answer than this. I'm not like on the LNC. I just I just do stand up comedy and podcast about this stuff. But from what I understand about it, there was they did have this major problem with like this software thing. I don't exactly know the details of it. This is something that started before the Mises Congress took over and all through them, where a big basic disaster of transferring data. So I think that hurt him a little bit. But regardless of any of that, it's like this. I think that the the state of the libertarian party was no matter what happened at Reno, going to it was going to be a rebuilding, you know, like a couple of years in this sense that there's a lot of people who were very turned off by the Mises caucus in the libertarian party. And there were a lot more people who were, you know what I mean, willing to go to to fight for them. And that's why we won in terms of the stuff with donors walking away again. Like I said, it's just to me, if the if the calculation is going to be that well, like, like, let me say it like this, right? There are kind of these storms that come in where things are very sensitive to talk about. Like right now it's the Israel Palestine storm that we're living in where it's like kind of takes a little bit of courage to talk about these things because you know you're going to get this backlash. The storms end and then it's like no one cares. Like I lab leak theory. Any of us were worried about talking about that now. You worried about your YouTube channel getting. No, it's fine. You can totally talk about it. That was we were in a storm a couple of years ago where you couldn't talk about that. Ukraine is like that, right? And for me, libertarians are when we have value at the most is when in those storms, we're willing to stand up and say the courageous thing. This is why Harry Brown writing when will we learn on September 12th is like the most amazing thing ever. Because the day after 9-11, he had the courage to say that. The only way this libertarian party thing is ever going to work and grow is if in those storms, we have the courage to say things. Now, I'd agree with you that could come without some of this other stuff that's not helpful. I want to stop there though. But that's not what the Mises Caucasus is doing. I would say I would argue they are. How? I mean that I'm talking about every single one of these conflicts. So the Ukraine storm when that came, they were the first ones standing up opposing that policy. Right now in Israel doing the exact same thing. So that's the type of thing that I do think the Mises Caucasus has, that they bring to the table. Is there use in that if nobody takes them seriously anymore? Right? Well, I don't think that's true that nobody takes them seriously anymore. You think people still take them seriously? Yeah. I don't. I went from being like, yeah, maybe I'll vote for the LP presidential candidate to now. It's like I would sooner vote for anybody else available on my ticket than these people. But why is that, so what is their crime that's worse than Joe Biden and Donald Trump? I mean, I'm just, I'm stunned by the shift toward, I don't believe if you actually, I think put any of these people in power, I'm not sure they would know the first thing about what to do with it or how to actually craft any sort of policy. I mean, you have text exchanges from Angela McCardle and Michael Heist talking about how personally bankrupt they are and how much money they've lost in the process of doing this. I'm sorry, but if you can't run an extremely small, just speaking candidly here, political party and you're not able to, you know, keep your supporters in any way, what, why would anybody trust your competence overall? Like I'm just very, who are, I mean, who's even running for president this year? Right? Like if the idea is, you know, you are a political party and you are putting candidates up for, you know, election for political office, surely they should be people with some amount of name recognition. Dave was going to run for president and you didn't run for president and now they're kind of flailing. Is that kind of a- Many of them are- I mean, I think you're kind of over playing this kind of like no one takes them seriously. And it's definitely- They have the text messages. There were those text messages. Yeah, I mean, I don't wanna comment on private text messages that people like put out there. I also just think that's lame and wrong. And it's also like- And Dave, you'll note that- You could look, I bet I could find, if I found private text messages, right? Like let's say I just had access to all of your texts with your wife and your texts with your husband. I bet I could cherry pick them and put them out there and be like, look, their marriage is failing. Look at this one exchange that I found here. But we never talk about how we're out of money. Yeah, okay, well, fair enough. But I'm just saying like you, so I don't know, like you're telling me you got one exchange. But these weren't messages between spouses, right? And I also- No, no, no, no, but the messages between co-workers still, they're messaging between, I mean, I don't know even technically what you would call them, but the fact that in a moment they're like complaining about something, I'm not gonna like draw too much of a conclusion from that. I do think like, yeah, like there's been the membership and money is down. The Libertarian Party historically has had lots of different periods before where membership and revenue have been down. In fact, they've had points where revenue was very down but membership was very high. They've had points where the vote totals were the highest but the membership was very low. There's been- The truth is that the Libertarian Party- You can all put them up in a bunch of different ways. Yes. So for the entire history, they've largely not been successful. That's the truth. We took this thing over a couple years ago and it's a huge restructuring that's been going on. Now in terms of like me not running, yeah, look, I mean, there's definitely something to that. Like I was considering that, that was kind of like a rallying point for a lot of our guys and I decided not to do it. And so there's been some disappointment about that but I do think that like I'm hopeful that over the next year and over the next couple of years, I almost think of the Mises Caucus as like, it was like this cleansing thing where we had to like return to like radical principles that are what the party was started on to begin with. And then kind of like, now out of that has to grow like candidates because that's really what rally these people, that are radical principled candidates. I want to take this seriously because I agree with you, right? Like there was a reason why I didn't choose to like tweet and take a little gleeful victory lap about the, you know, text message and email revelations about all the trouble that LP was in, right? Like I agree with you that it's important not to draw overly broad conclusions about that. But say you wanted to take your argument seriously and you wanted to look for these small green shoots that are poking up through the dirt as to the ways in which the Mises Caucus takeover has been successful. Where would you tell us to look? Like what should we look to as evidence of, you know, actually it's pretty good. Well, I mean, look, it's a, there have been like actual, what the Libertarian Party always kind of has only is that there have been local elections that they've won and that stuff does matter. I mean, there are, you know, there are people where we've gotten like on school boards and on city councils and mayors, I think a couple of sheriffs, you know what I mean? Throughout the country. Again, I'm not like heist is a better guy to talk to about all of this stuff to like rattle off all the names. They have launched this, the Mises Caucus has launched this project decentralized revolution thing, which I think is a really great like template for how the Libertarian Party should run. It's very different than the way it's been used before where kind of like the strategy for the Libertarian Party would be like, you know, you show up to like your state affiliate and they're like, what can I do? And they're like, I don't run for something. And whereas this is now targeting like winnable elections with nullification powers. So that's kind of like the idea is building this thing where the national is kind of like messaging and then trying to funnel that in to like the local winnable elections with nullification powers. Which is a precise strategy of like the Sunrise Movement, I believe, which is like the organization that initially put a bunch of money behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right? Like there's, you know, a specific, there's like a big infrastructure on the far left. Yeah, but they're going even more local than that, which is like, I mean, Heist was saying sheriffs are a big one because they've got a lot of power and or like a city council member or something like that. Things that are- People, positions where you can nullify federal laws or federal mandates. Right, and there's relatively low voter turnout. So you actually have a chance of winning. Right, so that's kind of the plan. And then the thing is that, you know, again, like I said, the other thing to me is just that it is like, look, I'll take responsibility in some way that a lot of my guys on Twitter are like, you know, can fly off the handle and say some wild shit. But the one thing I will say about my guys is they don't compromise on the libertarian stuff and they're not gonna be afraid to like, you know, say the thing that will get you a lot of backlash when it really matters. Now, I wish, like I said before, I'm not for a lot of the edge-lording stuff. I don't like that. That's not how I run my Twitter. I mean, I'll insult people sometimes if they insult me first or stuff, but I'm not like- A non-aggression principle applied to insults. Yes, kind of, right, my version of that. You're like, if provoked, I suppose. I can be a little bit vicious on there sometimes, so I'm not like saying I'm perfect or anything like that. Have you ever, in fact, been vicious to anybody in this room about, say, RFK Junior, no, this K. I think it was- I don't think I was that vicious, you know? I don't think you were either. It was Michael Malus who was vicious. Oh yeah, well, Michael Malus is a furious woman. You got to be careful about him on Twitter. No, I mean, it's all in good fun. I'm also the type of person where I can just take it. Like, I don't care. Twitter also kind of does that to all of us, you know? Like, it just, it is this thing that it's- Yeah, it's just, it's hard not to like get stuck into that. But I don't think, I don't think like, but I don't think that, I don't think I've gained like a following in the libertarian side of things because of any of that. I think like people like me because I'm good at explaining this stuff. And like to me, that's always, that's the way people are converted to, you know, like people will bring up like that one time Ron Paul was on Morton Downey Jr. And he kind of snapped at those people. But that's never anyone's origin story. No one ever goes, I'm a libertarian because I saw Ron Paul on Morton Downey Jr. They go, I saw him explain history to Rudy Giuliani. Dave, I think you're possibly unintentionally making my precise argument. I am so in favor of being bold and aggressive and courageous and truth telling and saying that unpopular thing at an important time. I mean, I felt very riled up in the COVID days. And it sometimes felt like I was maybe not at recent, but like, you know, one of the only people in my sort of social circles, very comfortable sticking my neck out and being like, no, fuck no, you shouldn't be forcing me to show my vaccination status at the door to enter a New York city restaurant. No, how dare you? And to the extent that you are going to force that, everybody should forge them. I'm sorry, but like the Lizwell Forging Services are open, I'll do it for the low price of $0, right? Like we need to be doing mass civil disobedience because this type of thing is just profoundly authoritarian. So like, I'm in favor of all of that. I'm in favor of that sort of boldness, but I don't see that in what the LP post-takeover is doing. And that's something that gives me pause. I mean, it's interest, your metaphor of it being a sort of cleansing fire or something, that it's kind of interesting. I mean, that's a way to think about Trump as well, even if you're, regardless of how you feel about Trump, it kind of cleared out the deadwood and the Republican party. And I don't think any of us are saying that the libertarian party that existed before was exactly tearing it up or killing it. I am interested in, yeah. Can I just say though, because I think like to some degree it's kind of like, I think you might be a little bit guilty of the same thing that I think like the New Hampshire guys are guilty of in being like, no, this is the strategy because this is how you get a big, because the truth is that there are 50 state affiliates, okay, and a whole bunch of them are just doing exactly what you're saying you'd like to see done. But you're totally fixated on the one because they're saying this wild shit, even though everybody else, everybody at the top of the Mises caucus like leadership has totally called them out for it and been like, hey, we think this is stupid and unhelpful. So I'm just saying that like, there's a ton of those guys, there's a ton of the state party affiliates. But I'm not just talking about the LP New Hampshire people, I'm not just talking about the authors of the tweets at like Megan McCain mourning her father's funeral, like cry more pork chop. I think that was an LP NH tweet, not an LP national one, you know, obviously. That 100% was not an LP national tweet. But I would say that like, you know, the LP national has, I see tons of, you would think that the lone political party that Danes to represent, you know, me and Zach, that when I would see these tweets in my feed from the LP national organization, when I see these tweets in my feed, you would think that I would be like, oh yeah, I maybe roughly agree with that. Maybe it's a little tonally different than what I would go for. But you know, roughly right idea. In fact, that is not the case. I think I had followed them because I'm like, this just makes me, you know, actively feel ill. What did they, I mean, I can't, I mean, we can, we can, you know, go through and spend all day doing this. But I think that there's a certain amount of, I don't want to overly fix it on the tweets, right? Because social media presence isn't, you know, it's not like anybody really cares about Twitter. You know, it's bleeding, hemorrhaging users for a while there. It seems like it's had a little bit of a resurgence. It's not just that. I think I'm also looking at the, you know, lack of clarity regarding, you know, who they're running for president. You know, I'm interested in these local elections, but I want to see better data as to almost like full on A-B testing, you know, how many people were winning office in those types of elections before the takeover versus now because that would be like the proper methodology to use. But it's a little more complicated than that because you got to figure out like which spot, because like, you know, if you've got 50 dog catchers, that's not as good as one sheriff. You know what I mean? So it's kind of like hard to. And also like some races are winnable at a certain time. And so a race might not have been winnable in 2012. Yeah, it's hard to parse all that out. Let me pull it back from the party for a second. Because I think we spent a good chunk of time there talking about the Libertarian party, but for Libertarians, what do you think Libertarians should be doing differently to win and interpret that as broadly as you want to? Sure. Well, I mean, like I've said this for a long time, but I think that, this isn't me, this is Murray Rothbard. So I'm not trying to like take credit for coming up with this. But that, because there was kind of like the battle between the Hayekian approach and the Rothbardian approach. Well, I'll fess up that my definition of Libertarianism was straight off, ripped off from Hayek, so against monopolies. Well, in fact- You guys are going to do a- Did you, you might have messaged me about this once where I was talking about the split between the like win over the intellectuals versus like the populist message. So I'm a big believer in the Rothbardian kind of like populist idea that. And look, I think you see this with Javier Malay, right? Like this is the way it can be done. Like this is the way to do it is to tap into this kind of populist streak, particularly at a time when the elites have so mismanaged everything and kind of like talk to people about how they're being ripped off. I like how they're being ripped off and these guys are doing it to you. And then the problem with populism always is that it's completely devout of any type of theory. You know what I mean? Like that's basically the issue with the new right in general is like, there's just no theory there. It's just everything they're against. And so- You mean like the Holly Vance contingent, like those types or- Yeah, I don't know enough about him personally, but I'm just saying like just Trumpian movement in general. There's just no, it's always like he's railing against everything that is pretty horrible. And then it's like, so what's your thing? And it's like, good deals, make the best deals. It's like there's nothing really there, but libertarians already have that. It's like libertarians have all the theory, but we're missing all of the like populism to make it like appeal to people. But Malay has almost pulled the greatest trick because you're describing him as somebody who really grucks the sort of populist messaging and really manages to use that to win an election. But he also I think represents a little bit of an intellectual streak too, right? Like he has, he has both. Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. You should have both. He's a hybrid, yes he is. He's an Austrian economist. Yeah, exactly. But he's an Austrian economist, he has the Rothbardian populism and sort of, you know, a bomb-throwing aspect to him. He's called wielding. But I've also seen like old TED talks of him where he's doing, you know, like our world in data charts showing, you know, the prosperity that capitalism brings. Like he is a very interesting model, I think, for libertarians to look at. I don't know how much of it translates to America or not. What do you think? Look, I think that if I were to say in terms of like candidates, like if that's what we're talking about, whether in the LP or not. But like Ron Paul really is who our blueprint should be. I mean, and Ron Paul had a lot of things going against him. Like he's the greatest living hero in America to me as far as I'm concerned. I'm just saying that like, you know, he wasn't like the best public speaker. He wasn't like the most like charming guy. He was older when he really got very popular. But he just did, he had a way of connecting, you know, like it's like our ideas knowing what's going on in the world right now and then connecting it to the average person of like how this is screwing you over. Like in how this is like, this is the story of what happened here. So that to me is always like my blueprint. You know, there's different, the question was just like my advice to libertarians on how to do libertarianing. Like I, my thing is always that it's like you have to actually know what's happening in the world and not just like live in your theory. Libertarians are way to remove just in theory. And that's not what anyone except us cares about. Like, and that's, so you have, you know, it's like that was the, to me that was the most impressive thing about Ron Paul was that this guy was like a, he was a country doctor who knew, just knew more and not just knew the non-aggression principle or not just knew like I've read Hayek and Rothbard, but knew like, okay, you know, if you just sit Ron Paul down and you're just like, okay, so tell me the entire history of, you know, like what happened, the entire history of like monetary policy. And you know, he could just talk to you for three hours about it because he just knows everything. And like that's I think what much more, you know, it's like when I use my father-in-law is always like the gold standard to me of Joe Sixpack. He's just like, he's like a truck driver, just been a truck driver his whole life. And he's just like working class guy, very smart guy, but not like, you know, not highfalutin smart, like, you know, like regular guy smart. And if I start talking to him about the non-aggression principle, he's gonna look at me like, what are you talking about? Like who cares about this abstract theory in your mind? But if I start talking to him about how prices are so high, like he's very, he's listening. And then I'm like, okay, well, this is what happened. And this is why prices are so high. And then he's totally with me on that. So I think that's what libertarians gotta do is like attach our theory to the problems that real people face and demonstrate how we have solutions to them. That's what works. This is I think why the obnoxious chorus of like Beltway Tarion bugs me so much. I think this is so frequently thrown at reason. But then also I feel like I get a lot of like weird personal insults about this, you know, on Twitter. And it's always odd to me this idea of like what image of me or Zach or reason have people concocted in their minds to possibly think that we're, you know, Beltway lobbyist shills in DC, like or overly policy wonky and obsessed with these things. I'm sorry, but like I spend most of my time, I live in Queens, I moved away from Brooklyn because I figured, you know, I've used voice plenty, time to do some exit. And it's time for a little bit of a, you know, child raising stage Queens pivot because I'm a little sick of the Brooklyn hipsters. And now I spend so much time around like surfer bros who are the dumbest people you could possibly find. But the degree to which they're so angry about like COVID policy and COVID history, because it's so frequently like forced them out of the water. And for any like outdoor athletes, this was, I mean, this is the thing that gives them life. And the fact that the government could possibly crack down on a solitary sport or your outdoors, you know, separated from other people. It's just like an astonishing, they're not libertarians because of highfalutin policy ideas. They're not libertarians because they read a Cato White paper. They're libertarians because they saw firsthand the degree to which government was going to great lengths during this very difficult time to screw them over and force them to step away from the thing that they love doing that was healthy for them. And you see this in, you know, surfer communities in Queens and in Costa Rica. And, you know, I encountered some of these dudes in like Portugal and like that's the strain. That's the genre of person that I'm so fascinated by and so excited about. And I hope the malaise of the world can tap into people like that. But it's just like, no, they're a reverent, they're independent. And a lot of the times they haven't even thought about how, you know, government is stepping on their necks until it actually, you know, becomes too impossible to avoid. And I don't think that they would ever put themselves into, you know, the category of libertarian. But I think that there is a deep libertarian essence that gets tapped into when you face any sort of like authoritarianism from your government. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, it's, it's kind of an interesting dynamic. But in terms of like the stuff you were saying about like, you know, the people, the libertarians on Twitter who like drag, reason and stuff like that, it's. It's a non-specific complaint. And I wish they would actually communicate what it is they're, I think you guys, I think you guys do for whatever reason, I think you inherit a lot of the Cato hate. You know what I mean? Like, I think Cato deserves it a lot more than, than reason does. But then your complaints to Cato. Well, I mean, look, Cato totally like humiliated themselves during COVID and the fact that they allowed some of that stuff to be run under their name. It's like, dude, there's just, there's kind of no coming back from that. Like you can't just, you live in under a moment that is the biggest mass suspension of all basic rights of a domestic population, perhaps in our history, and you're gonna sit there and put out pieces that are like the libertarian case for why this is all all right. And I mean, so like, I think they deserve it. You're talking about like the articles in favor of vaccine mandates. Yeah, in favor of vaccine mandates and all stuff like that. And then, and even some pieces that were like, you know, under some libertarian theory, can we justify lockdowns because would, you know, it be an act of aggression after, you know, just these mental gymnastics to pretend that like what we all see is going on here is not going on here. And then they were also wrong about everything. Like on top of being wrong to try to justify this, they were just wrong on the information. Like they would be saying like in the piece where they did the libertarian case for vaccine mandates, they say in the piece that it's become clear scientifically that the vaccine, that the vaccine gives you better immunity than natural immunity, which was like never, none of the science was ever even pointing to that. Like it's just on top of just wrong on every level. But I think that like, if you just, the way you talk about COVID, okay, if that was all anybody saw of you, I can guarantee you, you wouldn't be getting pushed back from those people. And I think the core of it is that- Was that a compliment in there somewhere? Yeah, you're great on COVID. Yes, there's totally a COVID. But I think what you get pushed back on, at least from what I've seen is the stuff that it comes down to that Murray Rothbard piece that it's, do you hate the state? And yeah, and that when you, what people don't like, and I think a lot of them, what gets a lot of them worked up is that it's like, when you see the libertarians kind of being like, taking this line that it's like, well they're just a bunch of jokers who are really inefficient at how they govern us. And they've got these, they don't understand these unintended consequences and these buffoons can't get it right. Whereas like this other crowd of libertarians are like, no, these people are monsters. These people are monsters who are destroying people's lives and they're enriching their friends to do it and they know what they're doing. And they're doing it anyway. And there's this kind of like reaction against the people who take more of the unintended jokers. I honestly think that both sides do, in the extremes do a bad analysis on this, on looking at the motivations of why government actors are doing what they're doing. I think that saying that they're all a bunch of goofballs. Which is in my argument. Yeah, that's not the right way. But also saying that people in government are particularly nefarious or evil. I mean, I subscribe to just basic public choice theory where they're driven by the same incentives that the rest of us are. It's just, it's self-interest and self-image. And it's, you know, Fauci has bad incentives. That's why he does what he does. Not because he's an evil person. I think it's frivolous. So I think it's, well, Fauci is it. We can talk about Fauci. I do think that is, you know, what Zach is tapping into is true to how I look at it too. I think it's frequently a mixture of malice and incompetence. And I think sometimes it's, it's sometimes a very case-by-case thing where sometimes it's more incompetence. Other times it's more malice. I would say with Fauci, I would probably, you know, say that that airs more toward the side of malice. But I think that either explanation as almost this, it's like a reflexive tick where it's like, oh, well, state actors are always malice and it's always, you know, it's their evilness showing or the other reflexive tick of, well, they're never really corrupt, you know, or evil because they're always just incompetent buffoons. Like that shows that you're not actually looking at the facts of the case before you. And to me, that indicates, you know, a very dogmatic way of looking at the world that will lead you to bad conclusions. So I see it as frequently a mixture of this. So I certainly wouldn't say that it's like a 100% evil and that there is no just kind of like buffoons there. I mean, obviously there are tons of buffoons in government. But to your point about like, hey, look, it's the same incentives that drive all of us. Like there's some truth to that. But that's almost like, if there's like, you know, some young man out there who's like, he's incentivized to want to get laid. So he like tries to charm a girl and take her out on a date. And then there's another 25 year old who rapes a girl because you know what I mean? Like they may have had the same incentives to some degree, but those are not like the same type of people or that, listen, look, you can look at a lot of these examples. By the way, have you ever heard Hillary Clinton on tape laughing about getting a child rapist off when she knew he was guilty? Like laughing about it. Like she just thinks it's hilarious. Are you on the Clinton kill list, do you think? I've done everything I can to get there. You're trying. I don't think I'm close enough to him. But like these people and a lot of these people at the top level of government are horrifically evil people who will knowingly, you know, like put in place a policy where innocent people will die. They'll lie through their teeth to sell the policy. Their buddies will all get rich off of it. I mean, like I don't think it's like, oh, those are just like kind of the same type of people as a guy who runs a bakery. Like they want more power and he wants more power, you know? Like yeah, they may all want things, but what some of these people are willing to do to get it is like so like crazy vicious. And I do think that at the top levels of our government, it is permeated with violent sociopaths who are very comfortable doing very evil things. And look, I mean, even just like, you look at the, like when you step back and see some of this, and this is true in media too. Like, you know, there's like a, was that that woman from ABC who was caught on the hot mic talking about how she broke the Jeffrey Epstein story but they pulled it from her, right? But one of the crazy things about that hot mic is that what she's upset about if you listen to her is not what you think any normal person should be upset about. Like- It's the lack of clout. It's that she didn't get the story. She's like, and I had it. Well, that's just general. I had the story. That's just journalist's brain, right? Like that's a huge problem, the entire, not maybe not the entire media class, but a significant, a hefty portion of the media class is obsessed with their own bloated and frequently wrong sense of moral superiority as well as this just astonishing self-importance that God made them journalists and their God's gift to man. But think about how evil that is. It's horrible. You didn't quit and go break this story anyway. You just stayed there, what? Cause the paycheck's good. So you're telling me you had a story about a child rapist ring with the most powerful people in the country implicated in this story and your bosses went, now we're not gonna, it'll mess up our relationship with the royal family. That's what she says in the hot mic. And her response to that wasn't to quit and just tell the story anyway. Like that's insane. And so listen, am I judging her personally? Am I saying like, she's an evil, I'm not saying she goes home and kicks her dog in the face every day, but I'm saying what she is participating in in her professional life is something morally repugnant. And like, that's how I feel about the highest levels of government and media, that there's just this mass, now, and by the way, there's also, I'm not trying to get like all Alex Jones on you here, but like there is- What do you think about the atrazine in the water supply? Have they feminized you now? I don't know any of that stuff. But I have read, I think he was not completely wrong about the frogs but whatever, that's a whole different thing. How gay are they really? Look, bohemian grove is real, okay? They do weird things there. So I don't know exactly what's going on with these people and I don't like to do the conspiracy thing. Yes, and I don't like to jump down conspiracies that I can't prove, but it is totally reasonable to look at like the Epstein thing, to look at bohemian grove, to look at these things and go, yeah, there's something going on here that's pretty weird. But my point, Dave, is that if you are looking at it as if this is because we're all ruled by some satanic cabal, and I know that's not exactly what you're saying, but you're kind of saying like, bohemian grove, they get together. You're winking in that direction, right? The problem with that, if it's wrong, which I think that it kind of is, is that it's supposed that the solution is to clear out this corrupt class and replace them. What am I wrong about? In what I just said, like what's wrong about what I just said? What I'm saying is it's structural. It's primarily structural. And where I think you're right is that sometimes the, Hayek even had an essay about this, why the worst gets the top. And it's like because the incentives of power do tend to draw certain personalities. So you might even be right that there's a disproportionate amount of sociopaths or psychopaths, just like there are in corporate America. Yeah, it's why there's so many pedophiles who are baseball coaches or literally coaches. That's why there's so many, like abusive people who are cops because these positions draw in those type of people, right? I mean, that's part of the natural cycle of it. But where I think it gets, where the populists muddle this message is like we have this shadowy class of rulers that once we defeat them and clear them out, it's all gonna be okay. But the reality is that it's the power structure. It's the problem that needs to be. And I think that- But both can be true at the same time, right? So like I think both of those things are true. I think, yes, it's like power corrupts. This is, you know what I mean? Like that's a big part of it. And just like you said, it's like this whole thing. So I'm not like one of these. See, this is what I think is so stupid about the kind of like, I don't know, like the kind of, I'm not alt right, but like whatever that whole bigger right wing world is and their critique of libertarians is basically like, no, no, no, we just got this bad group in right now. If we get them out, then we can have the government, you know, run for Christians or whatever their plan is. No, this is stupid because it is, like you said, it's inherent in the structure. It's not only stupid, it's dangerous. The mix of democracy and big government, look at it, obviously, what does it draw out of every politician? To say the most dumb down slogan to play to the most uninformed voter, to just say the, this is why Donald Trump did so well. Because Donald Trump was like, I'll do you one better. I'll talk like a kindergartner. And just say this, I'll just say everything's terrific or stupid. But really, it's not as if any of the others are much better than that. There was one speech that I was writing about where he was talking about how you have to flush the toilet 10 to 15 times nowadays. So low flow toilets, he was talking about how you have to run your dishwasher like 15 times. And at the end of this whole rant, he said, housewives vote for me. And I just love that he agreed to, which like so many other politicians, it would be this like, that would be implicit. And Donald Trump is smart enough to just make it a fucking explicit call to action. Housewives vote for me. I critiqued the toilets. I critiqued the dishwasher. Like he's run his own dishwasher in 16 years. But it's also like, it's totally exaggeration. Also, I get where he's talking about with like the dumb environmentalist restrictions, just make everyday life a little bit worse in so many ways. And that's kind of what a lot of the progressive left wants. I'm sorry, but like, I chafe every single time I get like a paper bag in the grocery store versus a fucking plastic bag, because it's just a matter of like, why is it that we're, there's a huge contingent that's just trying to make everyday life a little bit worse. And Donald Trump, I think, very successfully tapped into that. Yeah, 100%. But I love the explicitness of it. But then, so you're gonna have this whole dynamic of like power. Look, by definition almost, politics is going to attract people who want to rule over other people. So that's already, that's what the magnet is there. And then of course it's the problem, it's this mix of big government and democracy, which are very related, right? So you have to appeal to a population who, again, by definition, are only a very small percentage of them are gonna know much about politics because that's true about everything. Like that's true about anything. Like that's true. Only a small percentage of people have expertise in any field, right? So then you have that. And then because the government's so big, there is so much power being wielded that it's inevitably completely corrupted. I mean, what is our federal government gonna spend this year? I think over $6 trillion. If you're spending $6 trillion, somebody is going to be actively lobbying to get that power. But Dave, so this is the danger that I see in the populist strategy is that this right wing that you mentioned, that it does exist, the Nat cons or whatever we wanna call them, that they just want to install their version of a virtuous leader to impose their vision of the world. And that's their analysis, is that we have these corrupt degenerates running the government and we need good virtuous Caesar's or whatever running the government. And I worry sometimes that the populist strategy and libertarianism is trying to cultivate that and it's strengthening it. And this is like a pattern you see throughout history. Is the socialists wreck things and then the right wing fascists or whatever form they take then comes in and imposes right wing dictatorship or whatever. And that unless you know, Malay is a kind of interesting example because he's coming in on to fix what the socialists have done and the Peronists have done but he's extremely explicit about who the enemy is. Again, by the way, we'll see how he does. I don't know if he's the real dealer. He said this stuff and he won on that. So that in itself is interesting. So I think you're almost exactly right there, right? That kind of tends to be this pattern that's played out over and over again, which is like, and you could see this where there'd be these awful right wing movements as it responds to communism all throughout the world in the 20th century. And look, man, I think almost to me, that's why you need this libertarian populism even more because that's one of the most important components to put out this right wing fire because there is something really dangerous there too. Like, I mean, I think about, I remember saying this on a Rogan's podcast, A Few Appearances Back, where I was like, I almost like, you know when you'll see these things, like the craziest of the woke, whatever the craziest woke thing is, you know, they're just like, there we've, we're gonna convince this three year old boy, he's a girl, or like there's like some, you know, like drag queen giving a lap dance to like a seven year old or something. The lady rabbi on TV talking about the, you know, gory of Hamas, but she had like a beard. Yeah, like there's whatever, but you see it. And it's you're almost like, it's like my first thought is like, whoa, that's really insane and awful. And then like your immediate second thought is like, oh my God, we're gonna live into a right wing dictator. Cause my God, like what the backlash to this is going to be. And it's usually not going to be some right winger who's like, gonna be like, well, listen, you have your right to be a transgender person. Just maybe we shouldn't push this on kids. It's going to be someone being like, no, you don't have a right to do this. And you know, and so the libertarian thing there is like, you got to kind of like try to, to harness that populist energy, but in an explicitly libertarian way. Talking about that, it's like, no, like the only answer here. And this is kind of to me, the great libertarian insight, right? Cause like fundamentally we're kind of like a compromise. That's kind of like what libertarianism is. It's almost like, no, call a truce. Like that's it. Like you don't get to impose your view on them and they don't get to impose their view on you, but you both get to do what you want to do, right? Like with your own lives. But that's kind of the thing that the, the insight is that it's like, that's actually also better for you. Like in the long run, you attempting to impose your view on other people is going to end up in them trying to do the same thing to you and everybody loses. The thing that I would also add to that though, is that just because I totally agree with the articulation of what we value as libertarians, the thing that I would add to that though, because there is a little bit of tension within libertarianism about thick versus thin libertarianism. And I would say you don't have to be totally agnostic on all cultural issues. I think you can't be. Well, so the thing that I think about is like, so much of my politics, it's like the state ought to get out of the way as much as humanly possible to allow people to live their lives in accordance with their values and what they see fit. But that doesn't mean that I abdicate my ability to have an opinion about what the good life looks like and what human forishing is and what types of choices people ideally ought to make to be able to pursue that good life. And I think that this is sometimes where libertarians get a little bit binary where there's this idea of like, okay, well, some libertarians sort of gesture in the direction of so much culture war stuff and seem to have a very, almost very narrow view of how people ought to live. And I'm not always super confident in their reassurances that state power should never be used to enforce those ends. And that really gives me the heebie-jeebies. But then there are also a lot of libertarians out there who sort of act like you're in some way a bad libertarian or you err if you have any opinions about what the good life looks like. And so I'm interested in carving out this middle space. That's kind of on both sides of the libertarian spectrum. And what I've noticed a lot of times on kind of, let's say on the left side of the libertarian cultural space is that they'll say that, but also not recognize that they're doing the exact same thing. Like someone said to me once I got in this thing, I got all the online prostitutes mad at me. Cause I said that- Hey, we have our best performing episodes with Ayla, our favorite rationalist prostitute. So, you know- Listen, I'm just saying what someone said to me, I was just responding to someone is where they said to me, they go, libertarians believe that sex work should be legalized and normalized. And I was like, legalized? Sure, not. I don't really agree with you on normalized because I like, I actually don't think it should be normalized. Or, you know, they said something like it should be looked at as no different than being a baker or being of this. I'm like, well, that's never gonna happen to that. And then he goes, oh, see, you're like, you're a libertarian who's trying to fight a culture war. But I'm like, but so are you. You just had the opposite opinion of me. You totally made an extra libertarian statement there by saying that it should be normalized. The only, if you wanna be like, look, we're libertarians, but we're also people. So what libertarianism has to say about it is that it shouldn't be illegal. That's all libertarianism has to say about sex work. But as a person, I could also sit there and be like, well, no, I'm not gonna pretend that like, if my daughter wanted to go to college to become a surgeon or wanted to be a prostitute, I would have like no feeling about that whatsoever. And that one wouldn't represent that I have totally failed in the most important job that I've ever undertaken. And the end that like, so I'm allowed to say that. Being a surgeon isn't that bad, Dave. Going to medical school isn't that awful. I'm just saying, I'm allowed to say that. And now I can still say, I don't think the government should like enforce this on anyone, but what I'm gonna sit here and pretend that that wouldn't represent a failure on my poor, that I wouldn't like probably murder to make sure that never happens. Like I just, no. I think what we run into often at Reason told me if you agree is that people interpret, because we work at Reason, they're like, oh, this writer or video producer is putting up the libertarian opinion on everything. So, we have a bunch of different writers who have a bunch of different opinions on social issues. And sometimes someone will write a column about something and people will be like, oh, Reason is saying this about this. Yeah, that's all of us, right? And kind of to some degree it's fair too, but it's totally fair for you to just be like, okay, well, the Mises caucus took over and look what this one account did or look what this one guy did and then kind of like think of that as the myth. And that is, by the way, a lot of why you guys get heat for that is because you are kind of in some way married to the worst of your things. So when, for a second, which by the way, I'm not trying to knock her, I'm not, or anything, because again, I don't know her at all, but we had Twitter back and forth, so we're good. But when Elizabeth Nolan Brown tweets out a thing about how the Ron Paul movement was like, all a bunch of racists coming into libertarianism, it's like, okay, so now I'm in a position where I feel that I have to kind of battle you because I can't just let someone who writes at Reason call my people a bunch of racists when I'm like, yo, that's totally not true. And then now, you know what I mean? It just becomes this thing where it's kind of like, and now you guys, fairly or unfairly, carry that baggage with you amongst that part of the movement. That it's like, well, that's the publication who hires the lady who says the thing. The same way I carried the baggage with me. Especially you listen to your brother in Liz. Yeah, since I'm the other blonde Liz who now writes roundup, right? You're basically the same person. No, I mean, the- By the way, Liz Nolan Brown does amazing journalism on. And by the way, I'm sure I bet I'd agree with 80% of what she has to say. The thing that's so annoying about this is like, I don't know, I'm an individualist, man. I think it is absolutely fair game to hold me accountable for all of the work that I have produced for Reason TV and all of the work that I have written and all of the dumb shit that I have tweeted that has come into my brain that I've just thought the world needs to hear. But I do think that there is a little bit of a, I mean, you're correct that we associate, sometimes our ideological opponents with the worst of their crop. But I do also think we're libertarians when we ought to be individualists at the end of the day. And to some degree, it's like, hold me accountable for the things that I say and believe and I'm willing to defend. I'm willing to go to the mat to defend the things I believe. But I can't sit here and defend tweets of my colleagues or tweets of other fellow travelers, even if I tend to generally like what they, because I also don't know what exactly was going through their minds at that time. And I think that that's like a useful, we should all probably carry some amount of intellectual humility with us. And I think, whenever the three of us get into the same environment together or the two of us go on a podcast together or the two of us do a live stream together, the thing that is always really like stunning to me is like there is a lot more that unites us, a lot more shared values than things that divide us. And I think that's pretty cool. Let me ask you, Dave, about this, because we have a couple of questions to wrap up and one pertains right to this, this question of making more people libertarian or embracing libertarian ideas. Do you think that most people at their core are libertarian, more libertarian or authoritarian? You know, I don't really know what the answer to that is. And I don't spend too much time thinking about that. What I know is that I was totally compelled when these ideas were introduced to me and that I know that we're not at our ceiling. You know what I mean? And that I know that I hear all the time, everywhere I go, then I travel a lot. Every single city I'm in, every single town, every single show, every single speaking event, somebody comes up to me and goes, you're the reason I'm a libertarian. Like you introduced me to this and then I found this and then I found this and then it all made sense. So my thing is like I want to make as many as possible or introduce, you know, not shouldn't make, but you know what I mean? Like it introduced them to this line of thinking to as many people as I can. But I never in my mind think like, oh, we need to get 51% of the population to be libertarians because then we could win some elections. Because the truth is that like nations are never moved by 51% of the population. They're moved by a small group of people who are dedicated and like get what they want to see happen. So I think my thing is like, I think if libertarians were, I don't know how many libertarians you think there are in the country right now, I don't know. But if there's a couple million maybe, if we- Oh, way more than that. Well, how many do you think? I don't know, I think I'm very optimistic. I think 60, 70, 80 million. I think people- Do you think there are- No, but I'm not saying like, I don't mean like they're a libertarian, but they don't know it. I mean like if they're a libertarian and they know it and they identify as libertarian. I'm saying, let's say there's a few million, like could we get that up to 20 million? Like that would be, that would change this country so much. And so like my thing is always just kind of like, whatever that number is. Look, the truth is, if you talk to the average person on the street, you just, we go stop a random person right here and we go, what do you think of Ron Paul? Most of them won't know who you're talking about. At best they'd think you're talking about Ron Paul. And they definitely would not be able to really articulate and explain to you what the libertarian position is. We still, there's still so many people who have just like never come in contact with a lot of these ideas. So my thing is like, let me try to say it in the most compelling way on the biggest platforms that I can get on and try to get as many new people on board as we can. You're like, Ron Paul, is that that YouTuber who sells all the energy drinks? Is that his dad? The related question that I have for all of us actually, not just Dave, is what is your libertarian white pill? What's the thing that makes you the most optimistic? Okay, well, I'll say, here, let me give the Gene Epstein case for radical optimism, which I always love. This just like speaks to my soul. But so this was his thing that he said, was he was like, I hope I do it justice. But he was like, okay, you were sitting around in 1845 and you said to your buddy, you went, you know, I think in 20 years, slavery is gonna be abolished. They'd be like, you're out of your mind. Like the slave trade is like at the height right now. Like slavery is, it's just been an institution for all of human history. Like what in what world could you imagine that in the next 20 years, across the West and in the United States of America, there's just not gonna be slavery anymore. But that crazy guy would have been right. And I think he does one for the Soviet Union too. Like if you have been saying in the 80s, the Soviet Union was just gonna be gone within the next 15 years. It'd be like totally crazy. It's like unthinkable physics in history. And so like, it is not, there are moments like that where things that we're seen as like just inevitable institutions are just gone and they don't come back, you know? And so I would say right now, like, look in the year 2002, and I remember, you know, I'm old, me and Zach are old, you're not, but now you're at a point where I could go back 20 years and still I was an adult then. But I remember the whole year of war propaganda leading up to the war in Iraq. And like that was just it. It didn't matter if you got your news from Fox News or the New York Times or MSNBC or anything. It was just unanimous. You know what I mean? That it was like, hey, they got these nuclear weapons, they're friends with the terrorists. They helped us do 9-11. We can't let them hand these weapons off to the terrorists. You know, the weapons they don't have to the terrorists who aren't their friends. But they sold the story. And there was just no one else. Like, I mean there were other people but they didn't have like a platform. But now it's like, you have Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and then just like a million different shows that have, there's shows we don't even know about that have half a million followers. There's probably 50 shows that we all don't know about with half a million people watching that show all the time. And so much of that, those dissident voices are getting out there now. So I'm like, I think for the first time maybe in human history, the monopoly of governments over the, you know, receiving of information has been broken. I think they're freaking out about that quite a bit. But I think this is, see, this is an enormous white pill. And I just hate, I also just hate pessimism. I hate it. It's like the, sorry, I was gonna say, this is more what I say on my show. I was gonna say, it's the gayest thing out there, okay, is pessimism. You're allowed to say that. So you will probably get hate mail but I think it'll be fun. That's okay. I don't mean gay like being, okay, anyway. But it's just like. At least you don't see the effort. It's just, I don't, I just think there's like no, like I got little kids. There's no option for me to be a pessimist. Like that's just not an option. That's like, you know, I use this example sometimes but it's like an analogy or whatever, thought experiment. But like, it's like, if there were like five men with guns trying to break into my house because they wanna kill my wife and kids and I'm there with a gun. And I just sit there and just be like, I don't know, man, there's like five of them and there's only one of me. I just, I don't really think I'm gonna win. You know, it's like, what? Like I got a wife and kids, I don't have any option to feel that way. I'm gonna right away start, you know, it's like, okay, what are we doing? All right, get in the attic. I'm gonna snipe them off from here. I'm gonna, you know, I got a thing of gasoline. I'm gonna make a bomb real quick or whatever, you know? But you're trying something. So it's like, you don't have an option to just like feel bad about the future. Yeah, I mean, my white pill is very similar. You know, I made a, at the end of the decade, I made a kind of like, what was the 2010s all about? And it was called the death of the gatekeepers. That was when it all started. And during COVID, we saw them try to come back. And they certainly did. I think what was revealed in the Twitter files and all that shows how close we were to having that information landscape kind of captured across all the major platforms. And so it didn't happen though. You know, Elon bought X. He calls himself a free speech maximalist. I don't think he is, but he's at least trying to do something different. There's also now technological solutions. You know, I'm a big Nostra fan. It's a distributed network. I've got a documentary about Bitcoin mining that I'm here in New York for. And that's another major white pill is the loss of control over money. I mean, how much more libertarian like, could you get there? So between speech and money being uncontrollable at this point, I'm pretty optimistic. I think for me, it's a little bit different. I like the idea of like the disruption of the information industry, the disruption of the gatekeepers. But I think for me, the thing that gives me the most optimism about the future of libertarianism is actually oddly enough, the dirtbag left. I think we're currently seeing this weird fracturing of this sort of wokeness culture that I think for a long time had really seized people's hearts and imaginations. And I'm 27, a ton of people my age were just like totally wrapped up in this. And there was a little bit of this sense and I know this analogy has really been used far too much but the sense of like burn the witch and looking for heresy and then trying to stamp out heresy and trying to ruin people's reputations and livelihoods to the fullest extent possible in this almost like as if your heart was just seized by this fervor, this passion for this new religion of wokeness. And I think the thing that we're seeing that is so wonderful now is people are realizing how many false promises that religion gave them. They're realizing a lot of the lies there. They're realizing the degree to which some of these mob dynamics can really turn on them. And if you're in this constant pursuit of moral purity where it's not even clear what these morals are based on, boy, have you really been sold a false bill of goods and landed yourself in a very difficult situation? So I think the irreverence of a lot of the dirtbag left and the sort of people from within the left who are willing to look at their own side, their own teammates and say, hey, what you're doing is just crazy. And frequently they'll do so in almost the terms that you're talking about, the ones that you use on your podcast and sort of like this boldness, this irreverence to some degree, I think we're in a moment where like if you would call the 2010s this era of extreme overwrought earnestness, I think to some degree the 2020s are thus far the era of like there's absurdism that's on the rise. And I think you see this a lot with Jensie, you see this a lot with the dirtbag left. And I think that it's actually a really good thing to be able to poke fun at so much of the bullshit that people were peddling in years prior. And I think also to some degree, as people get older and like all of us have kids and so, whether you like it or not, we have skin in the game. There's more at stake, there's a sense of, I care what the future looks like. I care that my son has a good life. And I think to some degree you also see there was a lot of- And not just care, but like care more than I've ever thought cared about anything ever. I care more about his life and good than my own life and good, I would do anything to it. And I think any parent feels the same way. But I think there's this sense of like even if it took millennials or people of our rough generation a longer time to get to that stage and maybe they did that later, they're doing it. And I think to some degree you see people who maybe in their early 30s were obnoxious, lefty activists who now are raising kids and seeing kind of the error in their ways and thinking, oh, actually, I suddenly value different things than what I valued before. And I think when kids are taught things that parents disagree with in public schools or maybe even not things that parents disagree with but things that aren't phonics and aren't math instruction, there's a certain amount of like, well, an awakening that happens. A sense of like, what lies was I believing and what lies was I peddling all along? And I think that we're seeing a lot of this wokeness crumbling right now. And I'm kind of delighted by it. I look forward to the ash heap and hopefully people will gravitate toward more freedom, you know, and sort of learn the appropriate lessons from that. I don't know if they will, but I hope so. It seems to me like there's like, there's several different layers of like unsustainability with this country right now. Like there's like the financial level of like, where you could just look at like numbers on paper and be like, this can't keep going. Like, I don't know exactly when this has a card falls, but yeah, like it's like these entitlement programs, like just look at the numbers on them. This doesn't work. And there does seem to me to be something about wokeism that is just inherently, you know, like this can't continue like this. It's just like, this might work for the four years you're at college or whatever, but like, how do you have a life afterward with this? And it does seem to me that one of the big, like one of the big reasons why the kind of, not even right-winger, but the anti-woke crowd, let's say is winning in a lot of ways is just because to be woke is also, it seems to be miserable. Like you're just, you're sentenced to like a life of constantly being miserable over this. And whereas like, you know, other people can, I'm not saying like I politically agree with like conservatives, but you're allowed to just like have a family and be fairly happy and not like, you know, be at war with every inch of the world. It's a religion with no absolution. It's a religion with no redemption. And I think at a certain point, people get a little sick of that because it's a, like you said, it's a miserable way to live. And I don't know, at my core, I am a huge optimist and I think people frequently try to do good. And I think people also frequently sort of yearn for a greater, more robust sense of morality than the weird version offered to them by wokeism or wokeness. And so I sort of look at the degree to which some of this is fracturing and splintering. And I begin to feel really good about it. I'm wondering, you know, how much more DEI bureaucracy will various industries have to deal with before we essentially realize we're paying a ton of middle managers and have seen amount of money and like we actually, and I think to some degree these things are related, right? If we are thrown into harder financial times, whether in terms of the amount of money the federal reserve is printing and the amount of money the US government is spending or a recession, to some degree, paying six figures to the DEI bureaucrat that you just hired doesn't make very much sense. And so a lot of this fat gets trimmed. I also think it's related to the question of free speech and free discourse because the ability, when that scale is tilted by moderation that is being controlled by this apparatus, then it makes it harder for just normal people to say that doesn't make sense. And I'm hoping that the discourse is getting loosened up now and that people can speak honestly. And I mean, that's partly what we wanna do with the show and really appreciate Dave coming to participate in that today. Absolutely. And we will be back here next Thursday at 1pm Eastern and every Friday subscribe to the new podcast feed, subscribe to Reason TV to get new episodes and thanks for watching.