 Hello, my friends, and welcome to the 90th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. This week I'm talking with Mr. Geoffrey Tucker about capitalism and free markets in the big picture. So, Geoff's an interesting fella. He's been a long time libertarian, writes a lot of articles about the beauty of capitalism and talks about the beauty and almost the goodness in free markets and voluntary exchanges. And so I wanted to bring him on this show to talk about his bigger picture philosophy. Libertarians in general, when they discover the power of markets and economic thinking, it kind of sucks you down a rabbit hole, and it's very clear that markets create wealth. But a more fundamental question that not as many libertarians address is, why is wealth creation important? Why is it a big deal? Is it an ethical precept position that we have that most people just assume is shared? Is it well founded? Is it not founded? In this conversation we even bump into ideas about the meaning and value of human life, the breathtaking beauty of tuna fish. And a question that I'd like to hear more libertarians talk about, which is, you know, we claim that extraordinary, harmonious coordination of human action takes place in the absence of any central planning that kind of leave people alone with very limited framework for their behavior, you know, don't hurt each other, don't steal each other's stuff. And then out of that system you get incredible wealth creation, which is what we talk about. Why is it the case that the system is structured in that way? Isn't it amazing, even shocking, to think that we get such incredible results through the absence of central planning? This is a point that other thinkers like Leonard Reid, for example, have said is almost has a spiritual quality to it. There's almost some, you're almost getting at some like mysticism when you see the power and beauty of what happens in marketplaces. It's a really interesting question and so we're talking about that as well. Jeff is the editorial director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the CEO of the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. He's the author of eight books and literally thousands of articles, many of which you can see online over the period of a career of many decades. So I really hope you guys enjoy our conversation. Mr. Jeffrey Tucker, welcome to Patterson in Pursuit. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. Hey, it's my pleasure. It's good to be here. Thank you for inviting me, Steven. It's nice to see you, old friend. Yes, yes. My wife and I, Julia, are old Atlanta residents and we were just about leaving when you were moving to the city. So we're getting the Atlanta feels. I think eventually we're going to move back there. It's such a nice place. Are you really? You know, people do feel, whenever I travel internationally or really domestically anywhere, I always look forward to coming back to Atlanta and and a new type of happiness flows over me when I fly into town. I tell you, it was the first place we moved after we left upstate New York, which is a horrible place to live. And we thought maybe we just love Atlanta so much because of the contrast. Like maybe it's not the city. Maybe it's just that it's not upstate New York, but no, we've been all over the place and there's something special about that city and the people there too. Well, you know, it's a very wealthy population and a hugely diverse population and I like the city because it puts a lie to all the political claims for the last 100 years. You know, this group can't get along with that group. That group. This group, we need to have. Government planning to force everybody to shape up or to help the poor or to redesign the neighborhoods to keep people apart and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you come to Atlanta and like, just not true. Yeah, I mean, all the all the experiments that government planning have completely ended here. You know, you think about it. It goes back really 150 years or 200 years here in Atlanta. But the city kept being destroyed. And then we started again, but every time we'd restarted to have some new scheme, whether it was, you know, Jim Crow laws or or or busing or urban renewal or just some some incredible garbage. And then sometime in the early 2000s, it's like the city just kind of ran out of money and ran out of ideas and it was the best thing that ever happened. So now now it's just as close as you can come to kind of a government gives up sort of city. And as a result, there's a gigantic prosperity. So this is actually something I want to talk to you about in a little more detail here. So you're I'd say it's fair to say you're known for being a pretty big proponent of capitalism. Is that fair? Yeah, I guess so I've heard you say things like, you know, capitalism is life, capitalism is love, some of these big, these big claims. And they sound very nice and they're very uplifting. But I want to explore them. I want to explore what you what you mean and how important your views about capitalism and freedom are in kind of your in the big picture philosophy of Jeff Tucker. OK, OK. So usually when libertarians talk, we appeal to economics at some point. You say, look, if you have markets here, you're going to result. It's going to result in more wealth and more human flourishing. And that's very persuasive. It was for me pretty much all libertarians, I know, talk about the importance of markets. But there's a there's an assumption here that everybody is going to value economic development, that everybody is going to value wealth creation. So my first question is. Is that a fair assumption to make? And if so, why? Why is it that you think wealth creation is something important for humans in the first place? Well, OK, a number of points about that. I think it's it is a universal that people want to live a better life than they currently do. And I don't think there's any exception to that. You know, there's always things that we want that we can't get. That's the reason we wake up in the morning. That's the reason we act. That's the reason we move. That's why we do everything we do. Is to is to live a better life. I liked Mises's book, Human Action. His original title for that was called Man in Search of a Better Life. And and I think that's a I mean, I'm glad it's finally called from an awesome title, but I do like a description and man in search of a better life because I think that is a universally unites everybody. On the point about wealth creation, that you know, that's that's a difficult subject because because essentially you could describe economics as it emerged in the 18th century as the science of that that's hot to explain where wealth comes from. And and the whole subject of the creation of wealth is a little bit opaque and kind of difficult. It eluded the ancients' philosophers. There's this funny passage in Aristotle. And I think it may be in in his book on ethics that he's he addresses the question about how to get wealthy. And he just has a passing remark. There's only so much wealth in the world and no more and no more new wealth can be created. So it stands to reason that if you want wealth, then you have to get it from somebody else. Right. And that can have a number of ways. I mean, basically war or a pillaging or just robbery or something. And and that was the assumption for for most all of human history, just based on on looking around. It didn't seem like any there wasn't such a thing as wealth being created. And by the 18th century, it then became really obvious that wait, there is wealth being created. The classes are shifting around. People are developing their ability there are making choices to leave the countryside to move to the city so they can so they can get more money. And then they're getting money and money was awesome because then you could spend it on what you wanted. And you weren't just working for security and and organic vegetables. You're scratching around the dirt. Suddenly you actually got paid in money, you can make choices. And there were choices to make so you could go down to the harbor and buy fish. And you know, and then you could actually invest it and actually save money. And then, you know, the the exciting prospect that your children might live a better life than you and they could actually shift social classes. I mean, you could you could start poor and actually ascend up the social ladder. You could start dressing like the nobles and eating like the nobles and and marrying into noble families. And, you know, so, yeah, that was that was a dramatic and mysterious change. And and one of the things is beautiful about Adam Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations, is that he really does seek to to explain like, where's this weird stuff called wealth come from? And it's a hugely important topic because when we talk about wealth, you're not just talking about like money in the bank, you're talking about whether or not you're going to die young, whether your children are going to live past the age of two. You know, whether or not you're going to experience immense pain or whether you're going to have hope itself, you know, whether whether life can be good or do we have to forever wait to the afterlife for for goodness and prosperity? You know, that was a huge shift in the history of humankind. And, you know, there's this this essay by Benjamin Constante, the written in the early 18th century French philosopher, called The Difference Between Liberty and the Ancient World and the Modern World. And and he really does discern that there's a difference in the in the term liberty, like in the ancient world, the term liberty meant that you were you are free, which is say you're a free man, meaning that you can participate in the public life of the nation in some way. That you were consulted and you were a stakeholder in the structure of government, essentially. And that's what it meant to be free. And that's all meant to be free until suddenly you get into the modern world, which is probably the late 15th century, early 16th century. You started to see in the end of feudalism. And the move to the cities and and this aspiration for a new kind of life. And and the notion of liberty took on a different a different possibility. If people began to imagine for the very first time, it could be a universal condition that that is simply everybody could be free. And what did that system consist of primarily according to Benjamin Constant, this new invention, participation in commercial life. So so commerce and liberty became like bound up with each other. And that was a dawning of a new conception of what what life and freedom really were. One of the things that's actually frustrating for people that are conservatives and people who just want to forever look back in history and discover what it is that we should be thinking that sometimes got our aerostat on Play-Doh and the you know, whatever ancient philosophers and historic tradition or or ancient religions or whatever, the problem with all these perspectives is that they overlook this fundamental point. I mean, wealth didn't really dawn in the world until the early 16th century. This became obvious. I mean, the the plagues were over. You could move and you could aspire for a good life for your children who could actually you have hope that they could actually live. And there could be such a thing as progress. And and so, of course, there wasn't really anything to study concerning economics in the ancient world and this idea of wealth creation. It just it just wasn't on the map. So when you are looking at this big picture, the argument I think is pretty straightforward. You're saying the desire for better life is universal. The way to get a better life is to have the means available to make decisions that you think will improve your life. And the way to increase those means available is to have markets is to essentially have capitalism. And that's where we get wealth creation. And that's why there's a number of stages. And here we get into something really mysterious. Why did it happen in the 16th century? Why did why do you look at the huge demographic changes in the 18th and 19th century? You know, why did life change fundamentally? And people have different answers to this. You know, is it the invention of markets markets really weren't invented by anybody? Free markets aren't really a policy. Capitalism is not something that was really imposed by government. It's something that emerged out of human action. So there's a number of conditions that have to be in place. I mean, private property, obviously. But that probably was invented something like 100,000 years ago. As far as anthropologists know, it had to be invented because of the tragedy. The comments, I mean, unless you could let you could rope off of a space of land and say, this is mine. Please stay out. Don't steal my stuff. You couldn't really grow crops in a single season, much less have animal husbandry. And you wouldn't have the ability to make things without private property. Then you had this other very important issue of document in the existence of the private property. And in a compelling way that people would acknowledge that society, such as it was, could look at you and say, OK, I recognize your documentation as being legitimate. Which is why block change is so important, by the way. That's kind of way forward in history. But we've always been clamoring for a way to document private property so we could we could make the world more peaceful place. But why then? I mean, there's so many theories about this. You know, I think I think I think Adam Smith's answer is actually interesting. It's weirdly boring. You know, like, what was his reason for why wealth, for how we get wealth? I mean, his answer comes in like chapter two or something like that. It's called the division of labor. And that's that's a weirdly boring, nerdy answer to the question of where does wealth come from? It just means that we learn how to cooperate more with people and how to learn to trust others. So the goat farmer raises goes more than he needs to consume because he believes a blueberry farmer next door is going to raise more blueberries than he needs for consumption. They can actually trade. So they've already divided labor and then and then the goat farm actually starts adding employees, you know, whether for security or feeding or whatever. And so we just learned to find to extract value from other people around us and to trust them to provide that in a way in which is reliable and cooperative and peaceful and that gradually expands and expands. And then then it becomes exponential. And then suddenly you look around and it's like, wow, we're actually making wealth or making tons of wealth and it's changing the world. Not everybody likes it, but we're going to change the world. So there's there's a lot of thinkers I fall into this trap all the time who have very hard lines between moral claims, philosophical claims and let's say economic claims, political claims. But when you step back and look at your own belief system, do these all merge together? I mean, how important is morality and what you're talking about this? Because it sounds like you're kind of blending together even some fundamental moral principles about trust and about, you know, the desire to have humans be able to satisfy their own ends like that is itself a kind of good. And that that's not vert fry, right? The markets are absolutely fascinating because they do bring people together in ways that they wouldn't otherwise never have gotten together like. And you can experience this. I mean, you just any big city and you go to a Thai restaurant and the waiter comes up and you just say, hey, where are you from? It's like you're going to get an amazing story. And just the opportunity to serve and be served. It provides an opportunity for a human encounter that wouldn't wouldn't occur absent markets. I think absent markets, you end up sort of staying in your own tribe and not discovering, you know, the universal dignity of the human person. And so markets like constantly making these friendly, beautiful encounters of available to you, just boom, boom, boom, just one after another. And it's so exciting. Whether you're meeting in person or or online, markets do help you discover value in other people. And if you play with markets, and it's not a surprise that that the result of kind of intervening in markets is is to cause a reverse to happen, because due to undervalue and devalue people and it causes social division rather than cooperation, you can look at it, you know, in every sector of life. I mean, we keep people apart by force and prevent prevent trades at force intermediaries on people. Then human relationships break down too. So yeah, I think that's all part of the same thing. By the way, I got fascinated with you know, I think back at it. I got fascinated by economics when I was in college, but everything in economics textbooks was sort of clinical. And, you know, it was these these flow mechanisms and various Keynesian hydraulics and big aggregates. And I was interested in them, but they didn't seem very human. And then and then I read a history of the Weimar Republic. And I was like, well, OK, this is where economics becomes real. You know, suddenly you have all of society going up, evil and people losing vast fortunes and and, you know, terrible things, people turning out each other and then eventually elected a dictator to power and so on. And it was that book that made me realize, wow, economics is way more interesting than appeared in the McConnell Econ 101 text. This is really about about human life itself, which is why I was drawn to, you know, the Austrian tradition, you know, Hayek and Mises and so on. So I read an article the other day from I think it was Scott Alexander, who runs the Slate Star Codex blog, and he's he's flirts with libertarian ideas now and then he's a really he's very much of the rationalistic mentality. And he asked a really good question that it kind of. It almost gets into metaphysics with markets. And he asked it from from a perspective that was totally genuine and like outside the radical market anarchist perspective. And he was talking it was an article about anarcho capitalism, this idea that we have just pure markets and everything. And he said, the question I want answered is why should this system work? And what he what he specified is how is it possible that such an elegant and beautiful and harmonious system could possibly emerge in the absence of control over it and the absence of like a monopoly of rules of the game? And I think what he was getting at is this these ideas are so beautiful. If this were true, you need some kind of metaphysical explanation. Is this the hand of God? Well, you know, oh, right. So he was saying that's why he's a little skeptical of the extreme anarcho capitalism, because it seems too much. It seems like too beautiful. Well, I kind of agree with that. It's actually difficult sometimes. And I I I'm constantly amazed. I mean, I wrote I wrote an article the other day and I sometimes get of a while in my life, but I was I was well, here's what happened. I was in San Diego and I was kind of getting the munchies. And I was kind of hungry. So I went up to the front desk and said, do you guys got anything to eat around here? She said, well, our lunch room is not really open until like noon. But there's a vending machine around the corner. I was like, oh, yeah, that's all I need is a vending machine. I said, well, I don't really have cash. She said, OK, it takes credit cards. Oh, that's kind of cool. My new machine takes credit cards. Maybe I should have known these things of this, but now it's like normal. Ten years ago, nobody ever heard of this. So I went around the corner and I looked at the stuff that was available. It was amazing. So my eye fell on this this can of tuna. This is called tuna salad snack, a bumblebee tuna salad. I can take a fish out of the Atlantic Ocean and chop it up and mix it with pickles and stuff, stick it in the can and then it lands in this little spot. I just have to swipe my card for $1.50. So I was really excited about it. And so for $1.50, I went back to my room and started eating this delicious treat and it turned out that this it had not just tuna, but by the way, tuna fishing turns out to be one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. So you have to go out for weeks at a time and chase schools of these fish up and down the coast like from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to New England, because they go back to the spawning grounds or something like that. You have to be out in the boats for weeks and weeks, very, very dangerous. And the fish themselves are three hundred to one thousand pounds. So they're extremely difficult to catch, you know, and and just like the amount of dedication that has to go into just catching a freaking tuna is amazing. And then you take this tuna back and you have to chop it up. You've got to figure out a way to not salt it like they did, you know, in medieval times, it's all fish is salted because there's the only way to preserve it, but you actually can it and put it in a can, which is kind of amazing. But the thing also included eggs, which is funny because, OK, so you got like a farmer with chickens over here in, I don't know, wherever it happens to be, I don't know. Where do you Ohio or Iowa, one of those strange Midwestern places, probably have a lot of chickens. And so they make eggs there and then they have to combine it. But then you've still got in the can. You've got salt, which is fascinating, because salt in middle ages was money. And now we don't think anything about salt. Now, salt everywhere you get salt is like, you know, it used to be money. But now it's like, who cares about salt? Well, salt's actually a big deal and actually difficult. It used to be the world's most valuable good. But beyond that, there's carrots and carrots we know about. But celery turns out celery is extremely difficult to grow because the seeds are really tiny to have to germinate and greenhouses and then be planted out in the open fields. And they can only be harvested by hand, actually. So yeah, so so a very delicate crop and only in certain places under certain weather conditions and so on. So anyway, I'm looking at this little stupid can and all these ingredients are combined from all these different industries all over the planet earth and they all come together in this one little can. And then the canning technology itself. So steel, you know, and with a little peel. Because I was panicking when I first opened it. I thought, well, I don't have a can opener. Oh, there's a lid with a little tiny lip on it. You just lift it up and it pulls off. So it's got this funny little glue in it. Oh, and then it came built in with a spoon and the spoon is she made out of plastic, which comes from petroleum. So you're using like, you know, dinosaurs have been dead for tens of thousands of years, however long it is, extracting dead dinosaur stuff. And it's like, you know, and they put it in furnaces and pound it into plastic and they're making a tiny little spoon. So I have something to eat with and then it came with four crackers. So I'm imagining Iowa wheat fields with grain blowing and they have to harvest the wheat and then and then and then chop it up and then bake it. And they had these machines that stamp into tiny little crackers also that I could get four little round things inside my little bumblebee tuna salad thing. So I have something to eat. So I take my little petroleum spoon on my crack and eat, eat this little treat made from fish in the ocean and chickens from God knows where and difficult to grow celery and carrots and oh, and then also mayonnaise, which I mean, I don't even want to go into that. So anyway, this whole thing is a miracle in a can, you know, and I paid for this. It's just this quick credit card and and it cost me a dollar fifty. So that is an incredible thing. And yes, it is misdefined. How does this happen without a planner? I mean, no dictator in the world said, let's have tuna salad cans available for everybody. Oh, and here's one more thing, Steve. All this stuff happens and then it lands and it sits in his little pocket inside his little machine and it's just sitting there going, I hope Jeffrey comes along and buys me some time. Because if he doesn't, all of this would have been a waste. But it's really up to him. You know, it's up to him. I hope he gets hungry this morning. Otherwise, everything we've done has been a complete waste of time. And then I make my decision and I give up one dollar and fifty cents. Unbelievable. Yes. So that is absolutely misdefined, that people can't understand it. I did I totally get that such a thing could exist without a central planner is utterly misdefined. It does defy almost rationality in that way. It does. I mean, that's that is staggering. And there's so many pieces of the puzzle that are left out there. Like you mentioned the mayonnaise, but even the machinery, this is like the eye pencil idea, even the machinery that makes the thing that extracts the oil and nobody knows what's going on. None of these people are communicating with one another. And the boats, I mean, the whole thing is so what is then your explanation for this? So that's the system in which we live, that this kind of coordination takes place without any central planner and communication. And it results in a staggering incomprehensible amount of wealth in a tuna can and a vending machine. So how do you is that is that a miracle? I think it has something to do with what Hayek used to obsess about, which is this magic of the price, because the price can take all these disparate goods and all these different kinds of labors and over all many, many lands and everything else and kind of aggregate them into a single unit that also happens to become really helpful for accounting. So you can know if you're losing money or making money, which turns out to be a proxy for whether or not you're wasting your time or using your time well. So, yeah, so the price becomes this this beautiful institution that makes this coordination possible, which I know it's not that's not it's not the explanation you're looking for. Because even then it still begs the question, well, how is it that something like a price could could elicit such magic and be the source of such beauty in the world? And yeah, it is it is a little misdefined. You know, Adam Smith himself referred to the invisible hand, which I think is a really interesting metaphor. But it's not clear to the extent that it's not clear to me at all that Adam Smith met by the invisible hand. He didn't mean he didn't mean God. He just meant he just meant that there was this coordinating mechanism that works out there that's so beyond our individual consciousness. Like as an individual, you can only be conscious of the thing you're doing right then, you know, but you can't be conscious of everything else. You can only be conscious of yourself. So you need some institutions out there to extract that consciousness out of us and to get us get us outside of our bodies and our own heads, something to defer, something that embodies more knowledge than we ourselves can carry around ourselves. That was, I think, Huyck's essential essential point about what market institutions do, become tools of communication, essentially. It also makes you think, what are the other prices out there and the abstract? What are these other unbelievably powerful coordination tools that we haven't even discovered yet? Oh, for sure. I mean, there's language, of course, but language is so proximate. There's Bitcoin. I mean, yeah, there's Bitcoin. Of course, interest rates are interesting to themselves because interest rates sort of embody this even more abstract of the issue of our scale of time. You know, like to what extent are we willing to wait for things to first have them now and then having this arbitrage take place between people who are willing to wait longer versus those who are wanting to have things much sooner and they and through the interest rate, they can talk to each other in a funny way and make deals without constantly in a constant path of negotiation. You can just look at a single number and go, OK, that's worth it for me. That's worth it for me. Let's go. So where do you see this going? So so we've got this system that's accelerating in this fantastic rate. Who knows what type of type of inventions around the corner that are just going to be more game changers here? When you look out 10,000 years in the future, what what is what is the thing that we're what is the system that we're living in? Do you think we're going to be? Are you persuaded by the like the Silicon Valley people who are trying to make us immortal demigods? I mean, not so much. You know, I actually think I can't believe I once wrote that that mortality is a fact of life and I actually got pushed back from people. Yeah, probably from you, which was shocked me. But I do think that mortality is just something that's part of our condition. And yeah, I think we can extend it here and there. But I actually don't believe in, I don't know what what it is. You know, the transhumanism. So it's just not I mean, to me, to me, the beauty of markets is that it basically brings prosperity to us. But it doesn't actually change any fundamental facts of human nature. Basically, you and I are the same as, you know, Cicero and Socrates. We're we're we're made of the same stuff. So face the same world dilemmas. And you know, our nature is not actually changed. This is one of the reasons I love the Jetsons, right? Because it's that way in the future. But they're just like us, except they just have more stuff. And here's what's actually interesting about that, too, is it? And it's kind of a odd thing that that no matter how much wealth we get, how many gizmos we use or how, you know, accessible information is or how many miracles were surrounded by, we're still still sort of weirdly unhappy. Like on the end, wealth doesn't actually bring you happiness. I mean, like you keep striving for a better life and then you get it. And then you're like, oh, I mean, you know, it doesn't finally address that inner spiritual problem that we will always face. And and I don't know. I guess I kind of have in my head an undemonstrable proposition of dualism. I do believe there's a difference between time and eternity. And and time is is always going to be as the old medieval poet used to say, a lack of malum vale, a valley of tears. So I was having a conversation. This reminds me of with a gentleman who kind of took that idea that wealth is not really going to result in human happiness. And he ran with it. And his argument was essentially what brings happiness is community relations, is love, is like things you can experience with the people around you. And sometimes there's a tension between the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of the actual things that make you happy. And so he was saying, well, therefore, I think actually there's too much wealth. I think we should go back to the back to the state of nature, back to pre-industrial civilization so that we can actually be happier. What do you think about that idea? Well, yeah, people are always proposing this all the time. And one of the major objections to markets over the years is that they're not dramatic enough that really what makes us happy is to engage in large scale dramatic endeavors that require heroism and killing and upheaval and titanic historical shifts and war is perfectly suited for that. So I mean, this was this was essentially Thomas Carlyle, his objection to markets is that it kind of like this world, you know, a world of equals trading with each other and getting never nicer pictures on the walls and more and more comfortable furniture strikes him as just being boring and and it actually wipes out greatness. And that same critique was picked up a century later by Carl Schmitt, who the Nazi jurist who wrote, I think, the most powerful and interesting attack on liberalism in the 20th century. And his book, The Concept of the Political, he said, liberalism is a dreadful vision of society in which there's there's no hierarchies and and we do nothing but gain from each other's presence. Nobody wants that. Nobody. Nobody wants to live like that. You know, the real essence of life is having enemies and killing them and having friends and rallying around them and dying for them. Well, what's your response? No, I just don't think the Holocaust was such a good thing. I mean, that's literally my response to Carl Schmitt. I mean, his book came out 10 years before before the Jews were rounded up and and and starved and and gassed. And and and I just I look at those years of the war and, you know, I see coming out of it's actually creepy the way people called the greatest generation. That's actually a highly dangerous phrase because actually that was a terrible, terrible world war two is a terrible trauma for for all of civilization, not, you know, the hundreds of millions of dead. But beyond that, just the just the the trauma and and social life like in the United States, I mean, the churches were shattered, families were broken up, educations were ruined, trusting each other was was was was evaporated. Our lives were planned. We had to face the despot and food was rationed and speech was controlled in termic camps and just it's like all the worst things you can ever imagine. So I'm looking at Carl Schmitt. I'm like, you know, is this the drama you want? I mean, you'd rather have this and then than a baseball game and watching people drink, drink in Bud Light and eating hot dogs. Actually, that's and watching baseball. Actually, that's kind of a cool thing compared to this killing fields, actually. I think that is it seems self-evident that that is baseball games are preferable to Nazi Germany. However, and just in the past few years, my understanding of human psychology has changed because you asked the question, is this the drama you are looking for? And I would say, you know, there are I have seen quite a lot of humans who might actually answer that in the affirmative for it's like, oh, at least at least it's fun like that. Do you see the same thing? Am I just being a pessimist or is that not actually out there? I think it's actually some people have a taste for for high stakes gamerie and and wicked competitive struggles and stuff like that. And I think actually the capitalist marketplace provides that for some people. You know, there's there's various levels of risk aversion in the population. And some people are just really interested in building huge skyscrapers and and and bridges and inventing rockets and disrupting everything. And I think I think capitalism provides a place for them and and channels their energies in a way that's socially productive, you know, forces them to behave in a more or less voluntary way. This is I think actually one of the fascinating things that I find and the iron rands on work is that she took the sort of Nietzschean vision. Of of struggle, mighty, courageous, heroic struggles where you can barely sleep at night and you get up and you crush your enemies and all this kind of stuff and embedded that whole vision within a capitalist framework and actually made it interesting. You know, and I think that that is. So I think capitalism provides opportunities for for all kind of temperaments. And yeah, if you've got a war like spirit spirit, I don't know. Go to work for Goldman Sachs. Which is actually one of the reasons I was I was so unhappy. I mean, Donald Trump was not so good as a businessman in the sense that he's sort of he he lacked morality, which. Which is OK, so long as you don't have a state and he was constantly using like imminent domain and exploiting political favoritism and stuff like that is really bad, but he's the worst possible person to be president in that sense, because he uses that that Nietzschean spirit that he has embedded him in some absence of morality. Now he's in control of the of machinery of compulsion and coercion in the world's most powerful government. I don't think it's very good. So that I have two questions on that. One is for those of us who don't have who aren't dominated by that spirit of. Conquest of conquest, yeah, it's there. I definitely have it. Maybe maybe that's like being a man and being testosterone is you've got some of that that ancient wiring back there. But it's something I'm not a particularly big fan of. If I see that and I think a lot of people are like that, we see it in the world. What to do, what to do in a world in which large parts of the population don't want that and and maybe large parts of the population do and maybe even larger parts that we might be comfortable thinking exist. I think there are quite a lot of people out there deeply unhappy with their state of existence, deeply unhappy with the culture at large and should be totally fine with taking up arms, being like, all right, time to clear out the the the dead would and yeah, well, it's so true. It's so true. And I actually I think that because we still live in the age of the total state, this is actually generating a tremendous amount of social and cultural frustration. I mean, people perceive that there's something wrong out there and and they don't know entirely what it is. And oddly, people rarely just name the enemy, you know, the state. Albert J. Nockworth is great, but called our enemy, the state, right? And and his point was essentially you can talk all you want about, you know, all the terrible things in the world. But most of them are at the spawn of the state. And I think it's interesting that people don't talk like this. Like the left wants to say, well, the problem is white people, you know, or what I don't know what they say or heterosexuality or something. And then the right wing wants to say that the problem is diversity, lack of homogeneity or atheism or something like this. And nobody really wants to talk about the real problem. I mean, the question is, what kind of social system can we put together? Can we cobble together that can take heterogeneous elements of all of society with various kinds of things and and and put them all into the same pot and cause them to benefit from each other's presence? What is that system? And I think that system is liberalism. To me, that's a great discovery. It was an amazing discovery. It came out of liberalism after the end of the religious wars. Because, you know, before the Protestant Reformation, people just couldn't even imagine that a social structure could be could not be managed from the top down with a single religious faith. And religion is the most important thing in the world. It's clear we need to have one religion. Yeah, OK, 50, 100 years of war and killings, people finally woke up and said, you know, there's got to be a better way, you know. So OK, so part two of the question is what if there's a third alternative? So on the one hand, we have liberalism, capitalism, capitalism, wealth development, individualism. On the other hand, we have fascism and we have the desire for conquest and remaking the world and your image. What if there's another option, which is something like issue it all and why don't we like live out on the little farm somewhere in our little communities trying to see this, this, this, this way of thinking emerge on both the left and the right. Like this book called The Benedict Way, I think, by one of these guys who writes for the federalists who sort of you can Google the title. But it's kind of a right wing urge for a kind of radical cultural secession. Like, oh, the whole world's corrupt. We need to retreat to our own ways. And I guess my answer to that is that liberalism is tolerant of that perspective. Like that, as long as it's not forced, I really don't. I don't really have a problem. It's not a problem. You know, I also work in New England because I work for the American Institute for Economic Research and there's a kind of there's also the secessionist mentality among the progressive left, too. You know, and they they want to have their own labor currency and all that kind of stuff. And and they want to have their own organic forms. And I don't know, liberalism is tolerant of that kind of stuff. And to me, to me to live in tribes is the natural state of of humanity. You know, it's the markets that are the exception that they bring us together. So the last question I have for you is on this topic and what I what I look back on my own personal political progression and my understanding of economics and my understanding of humans, that was lacking a particular dimension, which a lot of other ideas latch onto. And then I think a lot of people are drawn to, which is what you could call the spiritual dimension. I don't know a better term for it. It's the the dimension which is about your quality of life and like choices, your freedom of making choices that you want to make and achieving of your own personal values in the context of like your really big picture beliefs. And my own progression through libertarianism, liberalism is it was kind of lacking that it was it was like one step to abstract. It was like, OK, well, we'll just let people achieve their own ends and that's it and nothing more. And there's no commentary about what actually might make humans happy and what actually might not. Like if you're if you're a libertarian, let's say you're a capitalist materialist and you think that just just the production of the. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're saying. Mises addresses this question in socialism and and and his book, liberalism, 1922 and 1927, respectively. And he's a little dismissive of it. He's like, OK, people say that liberalism lacks spirituality. Well, it doesn't address the topic of spirituality. That's for you to discover on your think it may be a little dismissive about it. Let me just make two additional points about that. The second one is that I have noticed an interesting trend in the liberty movement such as it is over the last 10 years. Like 10 years ago, people were obsessed with politics. And they would you go to these conferences and they'd say the state is evil, this is what needs to be done. This is the right kind of policies we need to have. And we need to look for politicians to give it, give them to us. And all those kind of stuff. Like every talk was about politics. Now you go to a typical liberty event, like I just got back from Libertopia in San Diego, the entire conference was about on one hand, blockchain technology, which I think has a mystical capacity to bring people together, which is something we could talk about. And part of the part, too. Yeah. Yeah, the crypt that the Twitter Wars and Crypto lander can be rather vicious for sure. And then the second thing is spirituality. Like a tremendous number of talks were about spirituality. I think I could look at somebody like Jordan Peterson. I mean, he would. You know, he first became kind of famous for his his political statements concerning Canada's anti-discrimination law over trans transsexual gender identity. But then he took his fame and turned it into he's become a kind of self-help counselor, like his latest book, Twelve Rules is all these things about about how to live as a better person with with more dignity. You know, I think people are really interested in that. And yeah, I think it is related to to to liberalism more than Mises wants to acknowledge. And I only think back to the like the parables of Jesus, for example. I mean, the parables were the core of his teaching mission, right? I mean, that was the very core of what he did. He told really cool Jewish stories with with fascinating weird endings. But vast numbers of them were about commercial life. You know, the wheat farmer with the silos, the guy with the with the the grape farm, you know, who invites all the various workers in the guy with the treasure in the field sells his house. You know, there's a builder who builds his one house on stone and the other on sand and and the parable of the talents. I mean, you could just go through them. I think there are probably like 30 of them, a vast number of them deal with commercial with the commercial, our commercial lives, you know. And so there is this like Jesus knew it. That's like reflecting on on commercial lives, on our commercial lives and on our place of ourselves and within markets is is a kind of a window becomes a window through which we can kind of understand who understand ourselves better and morality better. And they are linked very much. I think there's a lot of overlap there. So for you personally, what is your where where are your ideas on the topic of like personal satisfaction? So when you're I know you have an appreciation for canned tuna salad. Yeah, joy. And this is something I'm not sorted out. I'm not exact. I think I have a I think it has. I think the good life has maybe a one to one correspondence with the amount of love in your life. Love is a big one. But for you, what is what are those big picture spiritual things? What are you trying to accomplish and and why? Well, of course, it's different for everybody. I tend to perceive myself as like every I tend to think of every day as a gift that I've been given and something I want to use to its highest possible value, you know, and it's a little bit of a problem I have that I panic. If I'm not doing that, I'm like, I've been given this extra day and I didn't build anything beautiful with it. I didn't really achieve value with it. But that's just that's just my own perspective. I actually believe in the capacity of human human beings to work to make the world a better place, not a perfect place, but just slightly better. And that's what excites me. That's what thrills me. That's what I that I'm what I'm super, super interested in. And so that's personally what drives me forward. I mean, just like making valuable things and seeing other people being made happy and therefore perceiving myself to have made my time on Earth worth it. Like, I really I want to I want I want to like if there's a God, I want him or her to be happy that he or she gave me every minute that I was given and he made something beautiful with that time. Yeah, but I just make a slight difference. You know, like I said, I tend to see the world as like the Valley of Tier, the Lachromal Impala and and just like just a few less tears. You know, at the end of my life, I think I think that I think that would make it really nice. And the way I stay inspired is by looking at the seeming randomness of human interaction and how it like mysterious that becomes orderly. I never stopped being fascinated by that. Just this whole lesson of how the absence of control is the way that we can create order in the world like that, that one observation is so fascinating to me because it's so counterintuitive that I look for that every single day and I'm fascinated by it and I'm truly I'm obsessed with that. Like I remember going out to lunch with some friends a few months ago and we're all sitting in a single room and we needed to get off the door, go down the hall, go out the door, go across the street and enter another door to the restaurant and then line up to order our food. And I began to so before we got up with that, I wonder how this is going to happen. So we all got up and we can't all go through the door at the same time, right? So we had to figure out like really quickly a quick system for making this possible. You know, and so sure enough, one person held the door and it's like, after you, after you, after you, after you and so on it went. There's these little signaling systems that were constantly at work and we didn't have to actually talk about them or even be particularly conscious about them. We just all developed kind of like these rules of thumb to make our lives better. And it's really interesting because you're not going to like that. Just that operation was mighty and difficult and miraculous, like getting from here to there ordering and coming back again. You won't find anything in the federal register about this. The Congress didn't explain how to do it. We don't have any bureaucrats running it. It could have gone wrong, but it didn't. And so that that weird capacity of human beings to organize their lives without direction, I think is it's just a great source of joy for me just to take notice of it. And it's actually a real distraction for me. I must say, I'm constantly thinking about this. Well, that's a beautiful note to end on. I appreciate you talking about that and talking about some pretty personal things. You know, I find it interesting to just ask people these types of questions because everybody's got some little different insight. And it's not something that most people are discussing. And it's like, well, hang on, we're all humans here. Seems like we would all try to sort all these things out. So thank you. It is fascinating. And and and again, I mean, this is why I think liberalism is such an important umbrella idea. It's like like a big philosophy of the material world. Because because once you understand it, then you kind of lose your interest in weird plans and schemes and and political wars and and all the things that are so ugly and and and bring you down and make you depressed. Liberalism, I do think, is a can be a source of a personal, psychological and spiritual happiness for us all. All right, Jeff Tucker, thanks very much. OK, thank you, my friend.