 Test, test, test, test, test, I think I'm, I'm one minute early, but, uh, why not? Big daddy's in the house, turn some lights on, get some light on the subject. Another experiment in remote technology. What's everybody? Anyone here? I'm here. Just another, uh, gallery view. Okay. I'm doing gallery view this time. What's up, Nate? Nothing much. What you doing on the Saturday at, uh, what time is it your time? Um, it's 10 a.m. where I am. So I'm stuck. I'm stuck here in Commiforna, so. Well, don't say that to a guy from New Hampshire because they'll, they'll tell you, oh, all the reasons you need to move to New Hampshire. You ever got that? You ever got the peer pressure, like why haven't you moved here yet or whatever? I usually get the, um, why haven't you moved to Texas yet? Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, but what's so much better about Texas than, uh, Commiforna? Huh, I'm trying to figure that out. I mean, the weather's worse. Everyone says the taxes are better, but I mean, every, every state you go to, there's always a hodgepodge. Like they, they mix up the property tax sales tax and state income tax and they, they, they find their sweet spot that they can use to, you know, extract the most, uh, sugar from the venison. Yeah, that's true. Plus there's also fire ants. I remember getting attacked by those when I was last in Texas. Yeah, and it's hotter and the people in Texas have an accent. They're like that kind of Hick accent, at least in California, it's like a surfer dude accent, which sounds slightly less illiterate, but who knows. Plus there's, uh, tornadoes in Texas, depending where you are. Yeah, but in California, the traffic is apparently worse, but it's more beautiful. So I mean, there's a reason people live there. True. Despite the fact that it's increasingly more expensive. True. But that seems to be like a natural problem, right, that will solve itself. Yeah. Just negative feedback. That's the kind of feedback we like, negative feedback, right? Mm-hmm. But people never respond. Like you think like, come on guys, it's too expensive here. Why aren't you moving out? They find, they find a way and then they complain. Well, I live in this apartment down the, and then the government should subsidize me. So it's all, there's always a problem, you know, a never clear cut, clear cut thing. I mean, Austin, from what I heard, is a lot more like California's economy, increasingly. Yeah. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Hey, I'm, I mean, here, I mean, I know there has been a proposal to split California up into like three states. I'm either for that or we could just secede from the union. Yeah, but then you would have to leave because if you secede, then you're going to be even worse. Yeah, that's, that's where it sucks. Yeah, I guess you can have cauliflower and I thought Colorado was one of the original names for one of those California. Regions, but then Colorado took it. So there's, there's always a libertarian plan out there like how we can just come up with a plan that we can make everything better, you know, floating nation or Honduras or move to New Hampshire. I mean, there's always some kind of pie in the sky bullshit. True. Hey, no matter how powerful the government gets the black and gray markets could never be stopped. No, I know. So it's like, so why move. And then they say oh move because you can be around other libertarians and I'm like, I don't know if you found the best marketing employee because, you know, I'd rather live around Republicans and then have the libertarians. Deal with me on policy. Republicans know how to like, you know, walk their, their poodles on a leash and like, you know, follow the rules. I mean, I'm kind of the same thing, given the fact that when I became libertarian. Those who are Democrats, once they found out they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me and Republicans were eager to debate me and they even welcomed me at their events. I find that's a, yeah, but that's an activist thing. Like that's a certain events. I mean, in neighborhoods and regular life and employment places at restaurants and other places of gatherings. People tend to kind of mind their own business and like they like they find a way to get along. True. True. Now, let me ask you a question. I'm trying to understand this technically. Did you unmute your video yourself or did I do that? I muted it myself. Okay. Won't you unmute if you want to? I'm trying to test something. I'm trying to test my recording abilities. Yeah. And then I did unmute. So, so yeah. Oh, I can see. I can ask. So I'm just trying to learn this, this interface. What do you, what do you think about the zoom or other platforms? Oh, there you are. No, that's not you. That's Ivan. Ivan's muted on audio, but he's not muted on. Oh, there we go. Yeah, let's do some, let's do some faces that I can check out my software. Hold on. I'm trying this mark guy here. I know I should get more of a heads up for these things. I'm just what I'm thinking about is doing a weekly thing, right? If it would make sense, kind of a libertarian theory bullshit session. Make sense. Yeah. No. What do you think? Hey, I think, I think that's, I'm up for that. Yeah, so probably I should say more than 30 minutes ahead of time. I'm going to do this thing. So this is the reason I'm doing this. This is the gallery view and I recorded it last time, but it was only me and I don't understand why. I mean, I'm pretty smart, but I don't always understand these different systems. Okay, so let's see if this is recording properly. I guess you're all being recorded. So beware. It's saying that it's recording on my end. Oh, it is. It gives you a notice. Okay. Did you opt out of it or what does it do? Um, no, I cannot opt out. And no one is using a background except for me. Is that like the old dorky geeky thing to do? Should I not use a background? I don't even know if I would use a background. Okay. Well, the setting and zoom, I'm actually not sure, to be honest, I'm not sure why zoom is so popular all of a sudden because we had Google Hangouts, we had Skype, we had lots of other platforms. So I don't really know why zoom got popular all of a sudden. Well, I think that Skype is the worst in all of this because Skype can give, I think it gives information to government. So it's pretty bad and pretty bad in security. But most people wouldn't know the difference and that wouldn't be a technical barrier. And nobody knows what zoom is doing either. Right. I think they're trying to get more secure with security. Nate, you're still you're still muted. Is that your intention or is that just a screw up at my end? I never muted since. Oh, let me see. Ask to start a video. What happens here? I just hit ask to start a video. Something just popped up. The host asked you to start your video. Yeah. So I wonder what happens if I say start my video. Let's see what happens. Oh, apparently my camera's not working. What can that be? What are most people do on these things? Do they use their iPhones, their phones, their iPads, their computers? What are most people do when they do these things? I think it depends. People could use their phones with this from what I heard and so. Oh, hold on. I've got several admit requests. Let me just say admit all. Okay, hold on. Ah, here we go. Hello everybody. Sorry, I just I'm the master of communications apparently and I just realized I had to admit people. I don't know how I can make this automatic. Next time I'll figure it out. So this is iterative process. I like the green screen. It's not a green screen. It's just automatic. So what's interesting is so I have an iPad and iPhone and two old MacBooks and this MacBook Air. And when you load zoom on the MacBook, the new Mac, the old MacBooks, you get a warning that you can't use the digital background because the processor is not a quad core. You have to have a green screen, green screen, which I don't have. Hi, everybody. I'm Alex Miller. Hey, Alex, what's up, man? I'm just taking a break from the baby. Did you did you unmute yourself or did I do that? I'm just curious how this works technically. Did I want myself on mute? Yeah, I think I did. Okay, good. Because I see a lot of people have mutes, but I assume they're doing that themselves because I don't want to shut anyone out on accident. Hold on, there's another person I got to admit. Yeah, you can mute and unmute yourself. I get it. But if I say unmute all, is that what people want? Let me try this. All right, everyone's unmuted. But if we hear a crying baby in the background and they're going to be everyone will hate them. You know how that goes. It stands in notification or supposedly unmute you. So I just gave me an option and I said stay muted. My microphone. Somebody else is talking. I got it. I got it. Well, how's everybody doing? Good. We could just shoot the shit or if anyone has any libertarian stuff to chat about, I'm okay with that too. Just another open discussion or sure. Oh, perfect. I think I, I think I got a very interesting one. It's actually from quite a bit of research that I've been doing as I'm looking for other libertarians that I might read up on. And in my, through my research, I came across. Well, I think, I think pretty much everybody that I've been around in my circles pretty much know who he is. He was the founder of mutualism. He was most famous for stating that property was theft. And usually when, oh, whenever I hear something like that, I get turned off because I firmly believe in property rights. But then I do, I do a little more digging around. And it turns out he's talking about state property. Right. More like the property that, you know, the state has taken over or owns. And he's saying that that's property. He firmly believed in individual, the individual's right to property. And what's funny is, I look at him and it, I'm just reminded about, about Hoppe because I know that Hoppe is probably the most misunderstood. In anarcho-capitalist circles. And then I am, and I'm bothered by the fact that there, I have run into status or, or more specifically, like say paleo conservatives or nationalists actually quoting from him from Hoppe to backup or justify the use of force or, or among others, or among other things, because I don't need to go into that because I debated too many. But anyways, and then I look at Proudhon and strangely enough, I notice Marxists quoting from Proudhon to justify some of their positions. So I'm starting to go. So I guess like Hoppe, even though Proudhon obviously had some inconsistencies, Proudhon is also largely misunderstood. So what are your thoughts, Stefan? I mean, I do. I feel a lot of things through the intellectual property lens, not just because it's a litmus test, but, but well, in a way it is. Like, so Proudhon and some of the early, some of these early thinkers, like they're really good on a lot of things, right? But for example, you'll see even hints of it with Tucker and Proudhon. Like they're, they're against monopoly. They call it monopoly. And yes, they'll include that, they'll include property rights in that. And I think even as libertarians we could, we could see why they're doing that because, yeah, I was initially turned off by this property as theft mantra too, because I assumed it was just a lefty, you know, anti-capitalist thing. But I think the probably the best way to look at it is they saw the state institutions emerging and the way they classified property and just kind of formalized official property rights in a way that actually ended up taking people's rights from them, right? So for example, this whole idea of the, which I haven't studied myself a lot, I probably need to, but my sense is that this enclosure movement, like in England and Europe. So you have these estates and everything is sort of more decentralized and evolved over time. Like you have the hunting rights and the trespassing rights of the peasants. Like people can walk across, they can hunt, they can cross. And then you have the main rights, which the feudal sort of common law property system divided up, which divided things up in different ways. But if the government just comes in and just says, okay, here's the line. You can put up a wall, stop A, B, and C. You can see how granting these rights in an absolute way to one subset of the rights holders could be a taking a property from user fractuaries or people with easement rights or something like that. So you could say property is theft because state granted and enforced absolute property without a nuance and without recognizing previous rights amounts to theft because you're taking use rights from people that used to have it before. So I could see some kind of nuanced argument being made that way. If it was informed from a libertarian Austrian perspective, which it almost never is, it's always informed by this kind of quasi lefty perspective. So you can never quite trust it. But still, you know, so I sort of think that these guys, and so for example, Proudhon and at least Benjamin Tucker, like, so he says he's against patent and copyright rights. Now, I have my own argument and there's modern arguments you could advance, but what's his argument? His argument is that it's just a monopoly. But the same argument could be used by him to argue against rights in land. And if you take it too far, you could argue this mutualist or this gorgeous stuff where, you know, any property right in land per se is unjust because you're giving someone some exclusive right over something they didn't create and they didn't enhance the value of. And therefore there needs to be, you know, this gorgeous property tax. So I'm always leery of people that have this opposition to property and say properties theft, although in certain extreme cases. I can understand why they're leery of the state coming in and institutionalizing like these walls, right, which might intrude on the previous easement rights of different peoples. So to me, it's a complicated thing, which would require a lot of study. Which everyone who does it is interesting, but they're usually just mainstream thinkers. And so you have to read what they say with a grain of salt. Yeah, I mean, sort of my take on it. Yeah, I mean, there were several things that I found to be kind of like incomplete or vague. So I'm like, maybe he's talking about this, maybe he's talking about that, but I don't know for sure. Because there were, there were several things where I'm like, hey, maybe he's not very clear. So, I mean, if he was like saying, if he was like talking about, say, eminent domain, right, I mean, I'm sure we all have all heard of her Trump constantly talking about how eminent domain was a good thing. And it usually involves a government basically stealing land or or it could probably be applied to something else as well. I could see if I mean if Proudhon was like talking about eminent domain, I would see, I could definitely see what he means by property is theft. Yeah, but of course, so this is another issue. I don't think that's what he was talking about, to be honest. It wasn't eminent domain. It was just the formalizing of property rights. And this sort of hostility towards, well, this distinction that some thinkers in the sort of 1800s, you know, that they had towards land. I mean, look, when you tell me I'm against monopolies, like Benjamin Tucker did. Okay, and to my mind, that's okay. You're against copyright and patent. Good for you. And land, it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Land is not, it's like, it's not the same thing. Maybe the government didn't handle the allocation right. But land is definitely a scarce resource in which there should be property rights allocated in some kind of way. Maybe you could take into account passage rights and easement rights and hunting rights or whatever that had been accumulated over time. But that would be an, then you would set that up and there would be a negotiation, right? But, but yeah, this is the, and look, the problem is, look, these guys, 100, 200 years ago, they didn't even have the benefit of modern, say, to Austrian sensibilities. So you can't be too harsh on them. I mean, they did what they could. And if I was under Spooner, I could be harsh about, because his IP views are completely insane. Like Benjamin Tucker, who was his, his co-contemporary, got it mostly correct. I think like on IP, right? So he realized that's a monopoly. Spooner went over the deep end. Okay, so, so maybe you could give Tucker the, the benefit of the doubt, like you didn't quite get it right. But then he was before the Austrian age. He's before the modern libertarian radical age. Pretty goddamn good. Okay. But Spooner, no, that like there's almost, he's totally incoherent. I mean, look, I love, I used to love Spooner, like probably everyone that's our type does. But to be honest, the more I read from Tucker, like, I mean Spooner, there's almost nothing that I like about Spooner. I mean, he had this bizarre argument. So he tried to start a post office. Who cares. He, he was against the Constitution, I guess, but he tried to use the Constitution to argue the slavery was unconstitutional, which is, frankly, I think a stupid argument. I mean, I would make the argument if one of my clients was a slave. I mean, I would do whatever I could, but it's really, it's just a stupid argument. It's like saying that taxation is unconstitutional. It's just, unfortunately, it's just not. I mean, the Constitution is not libertarian. So he had this sort of dichotomy in himself, like he wanted to, he wanted to hold up the Constitution to the people that had been deluded in thinking it was some kind of constitutional, I'm sorry, libertarian invention, and then criticize them when they fell short. But the truth is there's no, there's no reason to think it was constitutional in the first place. Like the argument that slavery was unconstitutional is, I just think ridiculous. So that's one argument by Spooner. Spooner's argument for IP is not only ridiculous, it's just wrong. So he was wrong on that. And Spooner argued that by contract law principles, you can't justify the consent theory of the Constitution. And that's fine as far as it goes, but, you know, I think he doesn't go as far enough because you couldn't justify the Constitution even on normal. In other words, he took for granted the, the common law view of contract, which I think needs to be revised as well, which Rothbard tried to do with others. So he was too early, so you can't be too critical, but there's almost nothing in Spooner that really makes sense. I mean Spooner ends up saying that the Constitution hasn't restrained the government. Okay, fine, that's true. So what? So you start a post office, so you favor IP, so you say slavery is unconstitutional, even though you admit that the Constitution is not libertarian. Like if the Constitution is not libertarian, why would it happen to be that it outlawed slavery? Just coincidence. So I admire this early spirit of Spooner, but I just personally don't get almost anything out of this guy. So, Stephanie, can I ask you a question about Bitcoin? Sure. So there's a lot of talk about the value of running a full note in the Bitcoin community. And my understanding is the reason you want to do that is because when someone sends you Bitcoin, you want to verify that you actually got it. You also want to choose the rules that you're using so that nobody tries to create more Bitcoin for free or change the rules somehow. So my question is like a legal one. If you were to agree on selling Bitcoin, say, whose node would you use? Do you have to specify a node to say whether or not the agreed amount of Bitcoin has been received at the agreed address or if I say, OK, I'm going to send you $100 and you're going to send me X Bitcoin to this address, how do we know that I got the Bitcoin? Does that make sense? I'm not sure why you think it's a legal question. So you're asking me, when you participate in Bitcoin, how can you know A, B, and C? Why do you think that's a legal question? Well, I think it's a contract. I think if you want to be technical, if you want to avoid disagreements, you'd have to write up a contract to say, this is what the transaction is going to look like. Because, I mean, theoretically, we could agree to trade Bitcoin for dollars and I could send you the dollars. And that's pretty verifiable. We have a third party to trust the banking system. But if you send me Bitcoin and I say I didn't receive it, how can you prove that I did? Or vice versa, I think. Right. So again, to me, the question, how can you prove that you did to me is not, I mean, I don't know if that's a legal question. It's, I think that we all do things all the time that we take for granted or that are systems that just work, right? Like if you go spend a credit card payment here and there, right? Or if you send your friend a $35 Venmo payment or PayPal payment or something like that. If someone just said, how can you be sure? That's a different question about any legal issues. Okay. Well, before I pontificate on this, and one thing I respect and admire and like, I like people that admit what they don't know. So I know certain things and I don't know certain things about technology and the systems. I have an opinion, but is there anyone here online who wants to chime in and try OPINE? Anyone here who has an opinion about this issue? Yes. May I try to answer the question? Okay. I think the question is about connection of technical part of Bitcoin and legal part of contacts. And I have at least two ideas of how to connect to parts. First of all, you can try to describe in your contract, in your legal contract, what is to receive Bitcoin? What does it mean? So you can specify the, you can copy the weight paper of Bitcoin and you can specify some notes which can be used to verify. And if you want to be completely sure that you receive some Bitcoins, you should specify the Bitcoin correctly in contact. But also you can use oracles. So some trusted third parties. The oracle is a typical way to connect digital cryptocurrency world with legal world. So for example, specify blockstream.info says that X Bitcoin was received at address Y. And then once that condition is satisfied or not, we'll say when it's been received or not. In the simplest case, you can acquire just one HTTP request to the single website which is blockchain explorer. But it's better to use some platform which is specialized in such type of activity. It's called oracle. And it recives its commission because of correct answers. So it is not in their interest to fool you. But of course, the best option is to specify blockchain completely in contract and to force any jury which may resolve your contract to repeat the steps, technical steps. So I mean installing Bitcoin node, full node, and verify this process in their computers. It doesn't require a trusted third party. That's my answer. Yeah, it makes sense. Well, so my take on this is always with a bit of humility knowing what I don't know about these technical protocols, having a general idea of the way these things work. So you bring up contracts because that's the natural way to do it, right? And everyone's used to having contracts understood in a certain way, usually according to the positive law and the way that things are done now. Of course, I believe that the right way to look at all of this is the Rothbardian libertarian way of understanding, and in the Misesian way to be frank, understanding that we live in a world of scarce resources and we use as actors, as just human actors, we understand this and we use these resources when we can, right? We have possession or use of them to get things done. And then when we have society, we have normative rules that come into place, which is property rights rules, right? That's where the property aspect comes in, like the contract aspect. So a contract to me, according to Rothbard and Evers and the way I understand it, in the end can be understood as just a manipulation or transfer. And this is important. The transfer can be permanent, right? Or temporary. It can be partial or complete, right? So ultimately, it could be permanent and complete, like you just sell something to someone else. It's an alienation. Now in the law, the law distinguishes between these things. The law says there's lease, there's rent, there's loan, there's a common datum, there's all kinds of different, there's easements, there's user frauds, right? There's lifetime estates, there's the naked ownership, and there's the full ownership. The law divides these things up and the typical perspective on this is that you view your property rights as a bundle. We call it a bundle of sticks or a bundle of fags, right? Like it's a bundle of sticks that you can pluck out one and you can divide them up. But that's just a metaphorical way of describing the fact that contract allows us to basically have co-ownership, right? Now to me as a libertarian and as a fundamental lawyer, not as a day-to-day lawyer, which has to deal with the existing regimes that we need to use to get things done, but as a fundamental lawyer and as a libertarian thinker, to me they're all just different flavors of ownership. And ownership is the legal right, the legally recognized right to use a resource. And by contract between different parties, you can divide it up and you can split it up in different ways. Okay, so that's the background of what contract is, right? So the question is, do you bother to have a written contract or explicit contract when you do these deals with these exchanges? I mean, so you say, you talk about Bitcoin, are we talking about actual Bitcoin itself or the Lightning Network second layer stuff or something on Coinbase or something, some kind of private exchange between you and I using the key system? It depends, I think it just depends. Usually we don't rely upon any background legal framework except maybe for fraud. We rely upon the system that works, right? If 99.99% of the time, if you transfer half of Bitcoin to me by this mechanism and it works, we're not going to bother with papering over the deal with the legal contract. Yeah, I think both of your answers make total sense. However, neither of them address the seemingly widespread advice that it's super important to run your own full node. Right, yeah, so then let's get to that. So maybe restate your question. So what's your question about running a full node in a legal sense? What's the question? Well, it's not even a legal sense, it's just why bother? When deals are being made to buy and sell Bitcoin, they're all working. When Bitcoin forked, third-party applications, whether it was Trezor or Coinbase, allowed you to access both branches of the Bitcoin super ecosystem. You didn't need to run your full node. As far as I know, nobody's ever claimed to have sent Bitcoin and there been an altercation that, yes, I sent you that Bitcoin. Well, I didn't get it. I've never heard of that before. And there's lots of oracles, whether it's blockchain.info or blockstream.info. There's lots of chain explorers that can be used as oracles to settle any disputes. And as far as I know, they agree 99.99% of the time. I would suppose, I mean, if you're just a regular person using it, having a little bit, having a lot, but you're doing it on your own, that's one thing. You can decide to be more and more secure or not. I would imagine that if you're some kind of custodial, if you have some kind of custodial relationship, you're part of some kind of business that's an intermediary or a second layer lightning type thing or a Coinbase. At that point, you need to get serious about what your relationship is with your customers and what your obligations are. Like this is probably a bad example because Coinbase is not favored by most hardcore Bitcoin people. But I looked into this because I'm interested in the fractional reserve banking idea. And I've heard no one quite understands anything. But so like Coinbase, for example, according to their terms of service, what they say, if I understand this correctly and I'm open to be corrected, they say this, people that deposit their funds to Coinbase, the online part is insured, but the cold storage part is not, which makes sense to me because if they have $17 billion of assets that they're kind of holding at the behest of their customers, there's no way they can insure that. So what they do is they insure 1% of it, the 1% that they keep liquid and the other 99% they keep in cold storage somehow. Now that's subject to the risk of embezzlement or some kind of catastrophic failure, I guess, but it's less risk from some online hack because it's not online, something like that. Right, for example. So I don't know if they're at the chance, if they're the type of company that could become another Mount Gox or whatever, maybe they are, maybe they're not. I don't know many people that would hold a large volume of their personal Bitcoin wealth at a Coinbase. Some people probably still do. I mean, you might keep $10,000 there, but you're not going to keep $75 million there is my guess for most people just because of the risk because it's not insured. I mean, literally it's not insured, 1% is insured. That's my understanding. So, but they do seem to try to have a careful custodial relationship and define their terms. And if you look closely enough, it seems to me that they're 100% reserves. Now that doesn't mean embezzlement is not a problem, but at least they specify we're not a fraction reserve bank. Right, so I imagine that different custodians and people with different relationships that manage other people's money would have contractual relationships that specify all this. And then you have layers of insurance and security and whatever. That's how I look at it as a, like as a lawyer looking at it from the outside, who's not a tech expert on how these Bitcoin companies work. And by the way, nine tenths of the so-called Bitcoin experts that I hear that claim to be experts, they all, nine tenths of them seem a little sketchy to me. So that's why I don't really even trust, you know, because if you ask them a clear question, you rarely get a clear answer. Well, thanks. That was a great answer. I have another question unless someone else wants to go. I have a question. Yes. I have a question about borders. Of course, anarcho-capitalism means that you have no borders, at least no government borders or public borders, only private. But in the current tradition of land property, you can't build private borders similar to government borders. I mean, you only can create border in size of your plot of land, which is not very big. And I mean that private borders doesn't play the same role as government borders. But there is one important feature of government borders, which I think is way important to the state institution itself. Government can control who can join your country. And why I think this is important to the institution of state itself? I think it's important because when a lot of people, which doesn't agree with your views on the law, I'm not sure which word, but describe this, sorry, my English, which doesn't share your views of how the society should be governed. When a lot of people, which doesn't agree with you, join your country, the grounds which your country, which your laws state on, can be declined in some way. That means when you give the voting rights to different people, they can vote for some laws which you don't like. And when you have a state, it's not the problem. I think we can save the borders. But when you don't have state, it can be a threat for the Anaheim Capitalist Society. Because, yes, in Anaheim Capitalist Society, we don't have positive law. But anyway, we have institutions that enforce law. I mean, judges, I mean, police, which can be private, and courts and judges can be private too. But which mechanisms can save the libertarian ideals in such a society if we don't have borders? That's my question. I'll give it a quick shot. I mean, that's a deep issue, and it's one that one could despair about. If you want a guarantee for A, B, and C, there may be no guarantees, right? I mean, obviously, the issue is, yeah, you say a government can stop immigration, but they can't stop, well, I don't know if they can stop that either, as a practical matter in reality, in human civilization, people tend to move. You can distinguish conceptually between the trade of goods and services and the movement of people. And in today's societies, the movement of people, even in older societies, like if you have people that move as a people, as a culture, from one group to another, there could be a clash or a conflict, right? Or different visions. And over time, the minority cultures tend to gain political power or rights. And in the West, in modern society, of course, they do because of citizenship and democracy. I mean, theoretically, you could say, well, let's just have people that can come back and forth, but they don't have citizenship rights. But in the long term, that's unrealistic because they breed with the locals and everything changes. So the question is, how can you guarantee the safeguarding of liberalism, basically, which is a cultural precondition to at least some societies in the West in the last couple of hundred years. I don't know if there's a way to guarantee anything. Maybe it will be lost eventually just because of this process, or maybe the rest of the world will become more cosmopolitan and more liberal. And that's the only way we can assume the world will be, that cultures and ethnicities and tribalistic, you know, associations that we cling to now will become less important in a more cosmopolitan, modern world. That's my hope. My personal hope is that that's our only hope. But that means that your religion, your ethnicity, your background, all that will fade in importance and become more like window dressing, which some people are bothered by that because they will lose their cultural identity, which they cling to. Some people like me think that that's a good thing because it will reduce the importance of these tribalistic intergroup hostilities. But what we can do about it, I don't know what we can do. I personally don't think we can do anything about it. All we can do is in our own lives do certain things and promote ideas that are there for people to take, as humanity hopefully keeps expanding outwards. That's a general answer, but that's sort of my bizarre cosmopolitan view. I am concerned about immigration of different peoples into the western nations because of their political affiliations and because they will have political power and they could ruin everything. Yeah, or this could ruin everything. Yes, I'm concerned about that. On the other hand, there's 200 countries in the world and you have trends that happen around the country of the world, which everyone gets the mixture right will tend to dominate, whether it's South America or Africa or America or South America or India or China or Asia. Who knows. Who knows. That would be Western Europe and America because of our liberal tradition, I guess, but there's no guarantee that that that will be the one that will dominate in the future. This, this topic reminded me of a passage I just read in Hoppe, the democracy, the God that failed, which I've been loving but when I got to this passage I was sort of shaking my head and I was wondering what you guys think about it. He says, he's, he's talks about, okay, moreover, while interracial tribal and ethnic marriages were formerly rare and restricted to the upper class upper strata of the merchant class. With the arrival of bureaucrats and bums from various racial tribal and ethnic backgrounds in the capital city. The frequency of inter-ethnic marriage will increase and the focus of inter-ethnic sex, even without marriage will increasingly shift from the upper class of merchants to the lowest classes. Rather than genetic luxuration, the consequences increased genetic popularization. I don't know. Sounds like he's, what do you guys think about that? It seems like he's against interracial. Let me just say something quickly about that. I mean, I mean, I'm not, I don't pretend to be a specialist in, you have to know a lot or have a lot of opinions at least about culture and history to have these judgments. But I think that the sensibility there is this, it's looking at this world that we have, which is not monolithic, and it's not anarchistic. It's anarchistic in an international sense in that we have different tribal groupings of people or different country groupings of people, right? And in that view, if you're an anarchist, like you have this ideal anarchist view, which is what I have personally, a cosmopolitan world of individualists who basically have moved past this primitive stage of society. In the meantime, we count on counterbalancing groups that fight against each other, right? That balance each other's power. I mean, in the U.S. system, this was the legislative, the constitutional idea of separation of powers and balance of powers, right? This was the legislative, executive judicial and then vertically federalism, et cetera, right? But not just that, there was also the idea that we have civil institutions that balance power against each other. So you have the church and you have private society and they balance against the power of the state. So you have this vision of all these different counterbalancing, I think, all these different styles, P-H-Y-L-E-S by Dave, one of the Austrian, I forgot his name now. So it's just the idea that so you have the church, you have the state, you have its private civil society, you have vertical separation powers, you have ethnic groups, you have all these groups that fight against each other. That is not per se good, but having a separation of powers, you could see how that would limit the power of any one, of any one group. And so if you think that that's the backdrop, then you could be concerned that that could be upset by one group moving in, getting civil liberties, getting citizenship rights, getting voting rights, and just totally uprooting the existing order by voting, right? Effectively by voting, which is what's happening in the West to a degree because of immigration. On the other hand, if you stop immigration, that causes problems too. So all these problems to my mind are caused by the existence of the state. Like, no matter what you do, you're screwed. Like if you allow open borders between states, I think most of us who are realistic are aware that there could be some problems that could emerge from that. Like if you have a bunch of illiterate people that believe in Islam and religious theocracy who move somewhere and they have the right to vote within a generation or two, you're screwed, right? I mean, to put it starkly. On the other hand, if you don't allow immigration, then you're restricting private property rights and you have to have a police state and walls to stop it. So all these solutions are all problematic, but they're all problematic because we have a state and a state and a democratic welfare state. So in the end, the only hope is that we outgrow it naturally, or that we come up with a solution politically that ends it, which I don't think is realistic because political logic doesn't end. I mean, public choice economics has a point. There's a reason why people choose what they choose, right? And we maybe came out of the trees too soon. So I hear what you're saying. So I think a charitable way to look at what Hoppe was saying was, as just a matter of fact, if you let these groups that are tribalistic in their nature, right, everyone sticks to each other, then if you let them mix together, then you're going to have conflict. And this is the history of humanity to a degree. You know, inter-European civil wars and religious strife and conflict. It's not like you say the solution to this is to stifle civil liberties and have a one-world police state that prevents it, because that solution is not good either. I mean, I respect your answer, but it doesn't really make sense to me if you're saying we want to minimize conflict between two groups and two individuals from each of those groups are saying we want to get married. I mean, isn't that a great first step in reducing conflict? I mean, my personal view is yes, because I'm a modern western cosmopolitan guy, but I've known Muslims and Jews and Indians and Catholics and Protestants and they all make a big fuss when there's an intermarriage, right? Blacks and whites and everything. So apparently it's a thing that people make a big deal about this stuff. Yeah, yeah, of course. I would like a world where everyone was a Randian super Uberman and didn't care about your background or upbringing or your color. And no one would even, you wouldn't care about your religion because no one would have religion. We would have outgrown this by now. But in the current world, it gives rise to problems. And just, I mean, to my mind, the bare fact that the minority populations and subcultures that tend to move and gravitate towards the West because the West is richer. This is what happens, right? They move here because of resources. But the fact that they come here because they come from a culture that is poorer because they had less progressive cultural and economic intersocial ideas, right? They just didn't become as Western capitalist individualists as early as certain other cultures did. They import some of their views with them. And yeah, you could say it's a great mosaic. It's just beautiful that we have Indians and Chinese and Iranians, you know, and blacks and Mexicans and everyone's all working together harmoniously. Yeah, it makes for great restaurants down the corner. Sure. You know, I mean, fine. But if you believe that that tends to result ultimately in civil strife, then that's not a good thing either. I mean, to my mind, the solution is individualism and private property rights and cosmopolitanism, everyone advancing and becoming individuals. So I'm sorry, this is a big divergence from your original question, which is really about running your own node. I don't know if you should write your own node. I have to leave, but I really enjoyed this. Yeah, we have to cut it short anyway. It's an hour into this. Anyone else with anything else before we have to go? I got one last thing before I have to go as well. So one of the things that I have gotten into pretty heated debates with nationalists, I guess, which is in regards to, and as well as libertarians and anarchists, to my shocking surprise, in regards to culture. And what's strange is that it kind of stems from the fact that they all like last time talked about the use of the left right paradigm. And they often, and I don't know if this is what their argument is, but based on what I am seeing, they want to refer to themselves as quote unquote right wing, because they want to preserve culture. But I kept trying to explain to them that there's no way you're going to do it, especially with the monopoly on power. And I even tried to explain to them that whatever culture you identify with or want to be a part of could potentially be preserved under hierarchies or covenant communities or even a voluntary commune. Would I be correct in assessing that culture could be preserved under hierarchies. Oh, Lord, that's a big question that's that's beyond my pay grade. I'm skeptical of that idea but I don't pretend to be an expert in it. I think that that's futile to try to. Any culture you try to preserve is on the way out, I think, personally. I mean if you have to try to preserve it. You know, if it's not natural this is like liberty is like libertarianism for me. I think the whole libertarian movement. In a way, I won't say it's pointless because I'm part of it. But I don't think that we will achieve liberty by passing out pamphlets to people. You know, to or pestering your uncle of Thanksgiving dinner. I don't think that. The simplistic view is the way we achieve liberty is to make sure a certain threshold percentage of human beings that live in our region. Have read economics and one lesson and they get the idea. Because number one, that's never going to happen. Never ever, ever, ever will happen. Even when we achieve full liberty, which I think could come. Most people still won't have read. Henry Haslett. I mean, to have a simplistic marker. So I don't think we can achieve it by doing something because a public. I think public choice economics, it basically has it right. Like there's prisoners dilemma issues. There's free rider issues. There are. Once you have the possibility of the state too many people will naturally participate towards using that. And then it becomes a war of special interest groups against other special interest groups, which is what we have now. I don't see a way out of that. Even if you're totally rational. If you're part of group X. You're going to want your piece of the pie because if you don't fight for it, someone else will get it and you're going to be screwed. This is the problem of democracy, but it's the problem of politics in general. And why does that emerge? It emerges because it's possible. Right. So my view is a little bit of a pessimistic one combined with a little bit of my bizarre optimism, which is that. It's inevitable to have what we have now. But it's possible to get out of it. But my point is. If we get out of it, if we achieve a larger semblance of liberty, it's not because of people pushing for it. That's what made me think of this. Like, I don't think you can preserve a culture by trying too hard. You can't just die. I mean, you know, there are some languages that are just dying. Some species die. Right. Some religious practices just die. You can't be the, the, the lone guy remaining that fights for it and hope that you can preserve it with a couple of newsletters. I mean, that was sort of the pessimistic view of Alper J. Nock and these guys, they call it at the remnant or the remnant review. We're just a remnant of civilization. And all our job is to preserve this little flickering candle of liberty as a remnant that's left over when everything goes to hell in a hand basket and that when the people finally rediscover it, we at least kept it alive. Now the internet exists now. So the internet will keep it alive anyway. All of our ideas are out there. When society is ready to come back into the light again, they can rediscover our ideas. But I think if we ever achieve liberty, it won't be to the credit of libertarians. It'll just be because it's natural. And that's a good thing. In other words, if it ever comes, comes back, it's because it's natural. It doesn't have to be pushed. So that's my view. I mean, I think I'm alone in this view. I've never heard anyone else talk like me about this, but I'm extremely skeptical of this activist, the view that we can push things. It's like commies, like, you know, they think communism is inevitable, but they wanted to push it a little bit earlier. Okay. So full communism is inevitable. It'll happen in 2182, but if we push it a little bit harder, we can make it happen in 2135. Okay. If that's the best you can do is push something that's inevitable. A little bit earlier. Why bother? Because you don't even know if that's possible. So I guess I don't believe that cultures can be perpetuated by, by effort. And I don't think liberty can be achieved by effort. It's got to be natural. I think. Make sense. I mean, I'm just rambling here, but that's kind of my perspective on it. Yeah. I, I, I, I see what you're saying. I mean, one of, I mean, and just to kind of finish this off, one of the, one of the comments that I saw kind of, you know, kind of made me scratch my head, like, I'm not sure if this makes sense. And one of the comments that I read was that if culture is meaningless, then libertarianism can be front into the front end, the trash can. But I don't see how libertarianism has anything to do with culture. Yeah. So. Well, I've been, I, I don't understand programmatic statements like that. I mean, I, I don't know what it means to throw something in the trash can. Those aren't exact words, by the way. Yeah, I know. I'm, but, but this gets to, to me, to the thick, thin debate, which always frustrates me. I don't think that the ideas that we value and the values that we talk about as libertarians and individualists and free market types or whatever you want to call it. I don't think they're totally unrelated to many other truths and disciplines and even cultural ideas. Everything's related, of course, and no one denies that. I mean, just to exist like we, we all exist. I mean, what does it mean to exist? It means to have an effect on things. So if there's a universe out there or not a universe, but a solar system or a planet that exists, it has some effect on us and vice versa, even if it's very slight, but just to exist means to have an effect on. And to be intelligent humans, we have a multitude of values and interdisciplinary understandings of different things. Economics, math, logic, beauty, art, truth, education, history, science, whatever. You know, to be one of these, to say that I'm just this and not that is just stupid. Because we're not one dimensional, we're multi-dimensional, all of us. So everything relates to each other, but it doesn't mean that they're not the same. I mean, it doesn't mean that they're the same. Right? The liberty dimension and the free market dimension and the beauty dimension and the left-right spectrum dimension, none of them are the same. They might relate to each other and that takes a conscious rational human mind to figure these things out. So I just think that to dismiss culture is, it makes no sense because everything that we have a valid concept for that we've accumulated through the ages and through serious thought by a bunch of smart human beings who've taught us what they think to a degree by their writing and their speaking and their outpourings. To ignore it would be just foolish because it's another bit of data we can use to try to understand this, like this grand tapestry or mosaic of thought, right? And of understanding what it means to be a human. I just think that all this stuff is not so loosey-goosey and new-agey that we need to ignore the distinctions. I mean, you can say all this kind of stuff, like beauty matters, whatever, but if you end up using it to say that, therefore, I'm not completely against aggression because while I'm usually against aggression, it's not the only value. Like, when someone says this kind of crap, like, okay, well, I'm in favor of the National Endowment for the Arts because I believe in the arts. And while I believe in human liberty and private property rights, to some degree, it's not my quote-only value. Then at that point, they've made a category mistake, and they're basically, they're using this kind of muddled hodgepodge of confused human thinking to justify aggression. And if there's one thing we libertarians should be against, it's against aggression. And when you have these stickers come out and say, oh, well, then you're denying that there's other values than liberty, it's like, no, I'm not denying that there's a value other than liberty. I'm just saying that liberty is my value, and I will not condone aggression. If you want to, you can, but when you come to my house for a party, I'm going to keep a close eye on you, or whatever, you know what I mean? It's like, just keep these things distinct in your mind. So that's how I look at it, and I just can sell as a simplistic take on things, according to a lot of my haters. Hey, I had a quick question or point if you can hear me. Yep, I hear you. Hey, awesome. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess just your point about that liberty is not going to be achieved through effort. I mean, I do think in like a political sense, I definitely agree with you. Like you said, handing out pamphlets, I don't think, I mean, not to say, I don't think there's any value in that. I mean, I do think there is some value, but hypothetically, taking like the Michael Malice approach where he said he believes anarchy will be possible once humans can teleport from one place to another effectively. I don't know how, like, if that's, I heard him only say it once. I don't know if that's how like boiled in, but that would be a massive amount of effort of technological advancement. So that would be effort, but I don't know. Are you also considering that natural as well? Like, I mean, that's maybe we're splicing hairs here, but you know. You got me curious now. I've never, Michael and I are friends and I've never heard him say that. Now you're curious. I heard him say it once and I followed him a ton. So it might have just been a one-off thing that just kind of stuck with me. You can, I mean, feel free to obviously ask him about that. Well, I'd say in my earlier space cadet, Rothbardian space cadet phase, I sort of thought that the only way we'll achieve liberty is, now this was sort of taking off on all these different libertarian projects. Like, you know, you have Atlantis floating in the ocean and you have whatever. They have, they always have some new project. And the problem is nine-tenths of the time it's some kind of sketchy guy who's a scammer who's behind it and rips off everyone. And they never work out. They've never yet worked out. Floating cruise ships, Honduras, Gulf Sculls, Chile, whatever. They never work out. But I kind of used to think the only way to do this is if we, we finally become a spacefaring civilization and we start having like asteroid mining colonies and all this kind of stuff, like Heinleinian type sci-fi level stuff. The problem is I don't think that the, the public choice economics objections go away. Okay. So my current thinking, which is very, very, very rudimentary, partly because I have no one who believes like I do. So I can't, I can't really run these ideas by anyone. So I'm just like, I'm shooting in the, in the dark, but I sort of think that the only way we're going to have liberty is with an immense amount of up the curve of the industrial revolution, progress, wealth, technology, cosmopolitanism in the sense of basically people becoming a, I will say a brown or a grayer species, but in the sense that, you know, this racist tribalist ethnic stuff doesn't matter as much, you know, everyone's more tolerant and more modern and religion recedes into the background. And we basically have some kind of revolution with energy, like maybe, maybe some kind of nuclear power that's greater or, or robots or AI or nanotech, something or 3D printing, something that basically puts us up an order or two or three of magnitude beyond where we are now, so that we expand our numbers greatly, which would be good because the division of labor, the specialization of labor, I think the more people the better, but to do that, we might need to get off the earth. And also everyone basically becomes a little king, a little omniscient, omnipotent king with their own robot armies that protect themselves. So that basically people become basically, they don't need the state for their survival because they can make their own food or whatever, or houses or devices with their robot armies and they can defend themselves, right? So basically everyone becomes impregnable, invulnerable and invincible and immortal. You know, not to, I mean, not really, but like among among those dimensions. And when that happens, I think it'll happen gradually. And as that happens, the state will just recede into the background. It's almost like the communist idea that the state withers, just withers away. I think the state would just become a joke. It will become ineffectual and unnecessary and no one would need it. And people wouldn't even mind keeping the remnant state around. Sort of like the guys that watch the, you know, they watch the monuments that are left over in the national parks or something like that. Now that's sort of my crazy utopian idea of how we can achieve liberty. But you notice that that will happen because of natural tendencies among humans because of technology and wealth and basically shedding our religious and our tribalist ideas that we took with us when we came out of the trees too early. What concerns me about this theory is that we have never seen evidence of life in outer space. And that leads me to believe that there's, there's one of two things, right? There's the, it's the Fermi paradox. So either we're the only ones, which I suppose is possible. And that's why we don't hear anything. Or everyone kills themselves at a certain point, which the gray goo problem, which, which is what honestly I'm afraid of. And I just don't know where we are. Are we a thousand years away from the gray goo problem or a hundred years away? You know, I don't know. So I hope that we're not facing a gray goo problem and that it's not around the corner. So that's Kinsella's bizarre worldview of things. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I guess, I guess to my point, like earlier, like the, like you're talking about like, like effort, like is not like the creation of like Bitcoin, let's say, like, I mean, it's obviously the, the, there's the jury's still out, whether that was like a discreet, like libertarian, like, you know, like created out of like a libertarian philosophy, but like that, like if someone's saying like, Hey, I'm going to create something for the purpose of freedom, like, I don't know. You know what I mean? You're saying like, Hey, that's natural effort anyway. So it doesn't matter why they did it. Yeah. And this is why the, you know, the objectivists and the IP guys hate, hate people like me because they think that we're taking ideas for granted. I do think that when the ideas time has come, it's going to come. And I do believe that it was, if you just look at the March of history in the last 25, 30 years, you can see the digitization of everything. Yeah. Right. And information included and, and if you have a rudimentary understanding of, say the Austrian take on gold and what my money is and the problem with the Federal Reserve and central banking and the civil servants, it was a big blow to the investigation. I think you could see that. Look, humanity is on this part of the cusp of the industrial revolution, the information revolution. And digital money is coming someday. So to me it's just a detail, it doesn't matter if it's going to come in the year. 2009. doesn't matter in the history of humanity when it comes, it will come. Now it's going to come when it comes from a particular person, in this case whoever Satoshi was, and maybe that will that will fall away and something new will come, but I think it's hard to imagine a successful very future human race that doesn't have digital money. What the details are to me is not interesting. It's interesting to me as a human being in 2020 who wants to make money off of it and wants it to happen sooner rather than later, but that's just my personal interest. I think ultimately it doesn't matter. Digital money will have to come just like digital digital information came. Okay, yeah, I agree with you in that sense then. We're definitely on the same page as you. But if I had to bet, I think it will be Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. But it's just we're early, but we can't predict 100 years from now when Bitcoin stops inflating whether it will be the thing that took over the world. I don't know. I hope so. Kind of. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, I think I think most most and cats are rooting for Bitcoin. And then I guess just one other like footnote, which I was you made me think about was and this is something like I've just kind of started like thinking about and like apparently like a lot of the big tech companies on like a very underlying level are trying to create. I believe it's called the metaverse where basically like everyone has like like if you're familiar with ready ready player one, basically that maybe maybe not like the dystopian like actual sense of it, but like in the like, Hey, like everybody has a version of themselves in this game and people have jobs in this game or not like just metaverse. I don't know. I mean, I'm still kind of like working through that and just like how I don't know the potential prospects for I don't know, I guess a sense of liberty, maybe not like real practical like or even the you know, the idea that we might be living in a simulation and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, of course. I mean, I have my own opinions about that. Look, I'm just a guy who was born in 1965 in Louisiana. So I'm a little bit old and creaky and cranky and skeptical of everything. So I am and plus I'm an objectivist in the sense of my sense of skepticism about claims. Like when you when people make these claims that, you know, just the implicit claim, if not explicit that it's possible that we could be living in a simulation or it's possible that we could someday some day live in a version of a simulation like this. Yeah, not second life. What was it called reality player one ready player one? I'm not persuaded myself that that's even possible. Of course, things are that are we have these digital lives, right? Facebook profiles and whatever and we can use them and integrate them into our lives and we have augmented reality. Whether all this idea that you could really have an experience of life that's virtual, that is virtually similar to or even better than our current life, I'm skeptical that it's even possible. And I mean that as an objectivist in the sense of when you say something is possible. To me, it's an assertion. It's a positive assertion about the way the universe is. It's like saying it's possible that your brain in a vat experiencing everything as a hologram or a simulation. I think that that assertion is not is not justified yet at this point in time. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't personally know where I stand on that. I mean, I'm kind of in the air. I think it could really could go either way. There was a show there's a mini series on Hulu recently that kind of explore that. Oh, which one? Which one do you mean? Devs. Which one? It's called Devs, DEVS. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's an eight episode series. I didn't love it. I thought the storytelling was a bit clunky here and there, but that's really neither here or there. I was thinking about the one where the guys go to digital heaven. I forgot what the one's called. That was Amazon Prime. I think it's called like afterlife or something like that. Yeah, afterlife. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, it's um, yeah, I don't know. But just this idea that you could you could have you could have some kind of way of connecting all the physical inputs and outputs to your brain and simulating or reproducing some kind of experience that's the same richness that counts. I just I look logically, there's nothing logically impossible about it. It's just whether it's really possible. Like it would be like saying like you could predict the future if you have a big enough computer. It's like, yeah, but but the computer might have to be as big as the universe to compute it. In other words, it would be the universe. In other words, the universe is a computer. That's like what it is. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's actually like, almost you're pretty much exactly hitting on what the show does kind of like looks at. It's made by the same guy who did X Machina if you're familiar with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's stuff's cool. Yeah, definitely. But anyway, it's such it's such a world. If we if we get to that, closer to those kind of points, life will be more interesting for sure. And people will have alternate lives that they live in these little online compartmented worlds, and they will matter more and more and more. And as we integrate with 3d printing in robots and AI's, then then that will become more and more real. Actually, one of my favorite books is a guy by Daniel, I don't know if you've ever heard of a, it's got a Daniel Suarez is called Damon, D-A-E-M-O-N. It's a sci fi novel by this guy was read about 10 years ago. But it was incredible about how he tried to envision what you could do with our current technology to create these sort of autonomous little worlds, right, that were on the edge of tech at the time, bleeding edge tech. But yeah, I don't know. I just people that claim to know for sure I'm always skeptical of them. People with imaginations and sci fi writers, I admire them and that's fine. For now, what I want is the government to stop killing people and to stop taking my stuff and to let me have my physical normal mundane everyday stuff to myself and to leave it the hell alone. And if we can use Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency that they can't touch as a substitute or as a limit on government activity, I, you know, I can see that as a positive development. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, thank you so much for your time, Stefan. Thank you. All right, I'm going to end this here now, guys, but I'll be happy to do this later if anyone's interested. And I appreciate everyone's interest in being so civil and nice and thoughtful. Goodbye, everybody. Thank you. Goodbye. Bye bye.