The problem is, if you make the bureaucracy independent of politicians, who is it serving?If the bureaucracy doesn't have to listen to the politicians, well then it doesn't have to listen to the people.So who exactly is running it, right?
Who is it serving?And the answer, empirically, is that it becomes a self-serving, occupying army.It has its own goals.And empirically, sort of the logical interest group for that independent bureaucracy to ally with is socialists.
Because the bureaucracy and socialists do have the same goal, which is that they want more government control.
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So I already had two weddings in Australia booked, but I didn't want to travel anymore.And I like in-person interviews.So I was like, fuck this.
No, it's tricky.You don't like travel, but you like in-person interviews.
Yeah, so it's like, what can I get in London most of the year?
You've got to bring people.
Yeah, bring people in.So we couldn't do a Bitcoin show.There's not enough people in London for that. How many more times can we talk about it?How many more times?You can move to LA.Are we recording?Tricky managing that.Yeah, bring it in.
We're started.All right.All right.
Just make sure.Yeah.Do you live out here?
I don't, I live in Orlando.
Oh, okay, you're on the other side.
I would have moved here if it weren't so badly run.
Yeah, do you know what, I love LA.The weather's great.Great city, yeah.Great energy, shit tax.
The management is just so fricking awful.I mean, every element, right?There's trash on the highways.You're like driving around trash on the highway.I mean, even Detroit keeps the highway clear.I mean, it's just awful.
It's funny, the blue states get the, I think, get the energy, the creative side right, and they get the governance completely fucking wrong.
Completely wrong.Which is probably connected.Probably.You know, like, creatives.Liberal arts.Yeah, I mean, that was actually like a Soviet strategy.
Yeah, they like, you know, wanted to sort of market communism among the artistic elites in the West.They poured tons of money into that.There was actually some documents a couple years ago that modern art, is basically like a KGB psy-op.
It's just complete BS.They wanted to debase Western culture, so they fed all this money to people like Andy Warhol and whatnot, tried to kind of promote this stupid modern art.
And the idea was that the Soviet Union would have the beautiful subway stations with the chandeliers and all this classic art, and so people would associate that. in their minds, and then the West, meanwhile, would be this debased modern crap.
I mean, it worked a charm.This is from the New York Times and whatnot, right?This is not out media coming up with this.This is an actual KGB plot.
It completely worked, and of course, once you brainwash people, they think, they don't want to accept that they were brainwashed, right?
So even once these articles came out in left-wing media talking about how modern art is a psyop, everybody's like, ha ha, crazy.But then they keep on going to the modern art exhibits and whatnot.
Dude, I'm a member of Tate Modern in London, and I love it.Yeah, exactly.
You're completely brainwashed.
I am a completely brainwashed communist.No, I love it.I mean, yeah, but I like a mix, right?
Mm-hmm I'm happy to go, you know to the traditional Tate But Tate Modern is pretty good because you will get a mix of things you will get You'll get like Francis Bacon and you'll get Dali.I mean, I don't know, is Dali considered modern art?
Yeah, yeah, I'm like still down with Dali.I mean Dali is fantastic
Have you, well you must have been to the one in St.Pete's, there's a museum in St.Petersburg.No, I haven't been there.That's not far from you.I know.Did you know it was there?No, I'm a total slacker on art.
So I took my kids to Disneyland once, and we got fucking bored after three days.We were like, what else should we do?So we were just like, Gatorland, and then we looked up, we found, I was like, there's a, there's a Dali museum in St.Petersburg.
It was a couple of hour drive, I was like, off we went.It's incredible.
You skipped Gatorland for that, though?No, we did both.
Right on, right on.We went to Gatorland, we saw the albino gator, and then we went up to the Dali Museum.Yeah, it was cool.I didn't even know it was there.That's fantastic.I think it's the largest collection of Dali works.Of all places.Yeah.
It's near you.Tampa, yeah, basically.Beyond Tampa. But yeah, no, I'm basically a commie now.I'm a modern art-loving commie.And yeah, I believe we should, well, we've got a commie government in the UK right now.Jesus Christ.
Well, this is why I wanted to see you, man.So, I've been wrestling with a lot, right?We got a shitty government in the UK right now.That's incredible, yeah.That has succeeded a previously shitty government.
and you're about to have an election here where a shitty government might replace a shitty government.And I'm at that point now, I'm like, do people even know what they're voting for anymore?Do they truly understand?
Because if you go, I went and looked, I was like, what is the most important thing for voters?There's always a list, but number one always comes up is the economy. But the economy continuously gets worse.
I think our taxation in the UK has gone, in like the last 20 years, as a percentage of GDP, has gone up from like 33% to 41% and said to go higher.I looked at the charts across Europe, it's over 50% in Belgium.We keep voting for having less money.
Yeah, and I think there's a reason for that, which is that you've got two layers of government, right?You've got the one that you elect, the politicians, the political, you know, sort of sector, and then you've got the bureaucracy.
And the bureaucracy, this is something that really happened across the West, but there was this movement in the 1800s to make the bureaucracy independent of the politicians.And in the US, anyway, that was driven by corruption concerns.
So the government is always corrupt because the guy who owns it is not the guy who's running it.So government will always be corrupt.
If you go back through history and you look at every single war in the history of mankind has just been shot through with corruption.They buy rotting food for the soldiers and so on and so forth.Governments are just by nature corrupt.
Maybe if you've got like an absolute monarchy, it's not because it's treated like a family business.But anyway, governments are corrupt.
And so in the 19th century, there was a movement in the US anyway, to professionalize the bureaucracy by making it independent of politicians.
So rather than having the so-called spoil system, right, where every time they win an election, they give jobs to their buddies and this, the idea is that you would have this independent bureaucracy.Now the problem is- Yeah, exactly.Right, from 1883.
You're impressed, aren't you?I am impressed, yes.Do you know why?It literally came up in my last interview.Did it really?Yeah.
Mike Brock was telling me about it, because he was saying what would happen, and this is some of the fears with Trump, because of the things J.D.
Vance is saying, is that Trump would want to go and just replace everyone with his own people, but the Pendleton Act stops him.
And he was explaining to me, this is really important because otherwise, you essentially, the whole of government becomes a monopoly for that party, for that party's policies.And then it could become very difficult to remove them.
So yeah, so I learned a thing.
Yeah, no, nicely done.Yeah, I'm actually very impressed from all the way across the pond.The problem is, if you make the bureaucracy independent of politicians, who is it serving?
So the only voice that the people have on how their government is run is the politicians, and that's by design.And so if the bureaucracy doesn't have to listen to the politicians, well then it doesn't have to listen to the people.So who exactly
is running it, right?Who is it serving?And the answer empirically is that it becomes a self-serving occupying army.It has its own goals.And empirically, sort of the logical interest group for that independent bureaucracy to ally with is socialists.
Because the bureaucracy and socialists do have the same goal, which is that they want more government control.
But see, this was a discussion I was having with somebody recently, because in the UK, obviously, we have on the right, the Conservatives, on the left, Labour.And I was like, I think they're both Socialists.But we think of the left as Socialists.
I just think they're less, sorry, the Conservatives are less Socialists.But they're still essentially Socialists.I mean, we have a huge welfare state, we have the NHS, we have a huge income redistribution system.
So to me, it's just a spectrum of Socialism.
Yeah, it's a problem.I mean, fundamentally, that battle was lost in 1913 with World War I. And ever since then, again, sticking with U.S.history just because I know it better, before World War I, you could say that we had a two-party system.
We had two different ideologies in the U.S.So the Democrat Party was generally small government.The so-called Bourbon Democrats They flipped.
And the Republican Party were sort of these religious nutjobs who wanted to reform Earth and make it into the reflection of the second coming of Christ.And I mean, they were shot through with literally sort of religious fanatics.
And so those were the two parties.And so the Republican Party was very activist and they wanted government to control more things to save people from themselves.And the Democrat Party was the party of leave me alone.
And generally that Democrat party was popular among immigrants coming to the US because the sort of first wave of Americans were these kind of religious, not jobs, the Puritans.And then subsequent waves generally came for jobs, right?
So there are Irish, Italians, Germans, a lot of them were Catholics who were not as religiously minded. And generally, they wanted to be left alone, right?
They didn't want to be part of this great project for the remaking of Earth into Christ's paradise.And so that's kind of how the parties broke down.And the problem is,
In the US, a lot of the dynamics had to do with the Civil War where the Democrats were temporarily very weak because they were associated with slavery and they were sort of seen as traitors.
But going into the progressive era, so talking like 1900, 1910, really both parties flipped over to where they just became two versions of the Republican Party.So the Republican Party didn't change, it was still,
You know these sort of activist nutjobs and the Democrat Party became these super Republicans right so they leapfrogged them And became ever more extreme in the u.s.
Anyway ever since then we've really had two flavors of the same party and You can see it in voter turnout Right, so if you look back before the parties sort of copied each other, turnout in the US was much, much higher in elections.
So it was 60% plus, and now it's like 40 to 50%.So a huge portion of the population has been disenfranchised.I think that actually, that doesn't reflect the full move, because a lot of people just sort of hold their nose, like I do, right?
You know, I want Ron Paul to win this year, but unfortunately that's not realistic, right?And so I have to choose between the lesser of two evils.So a lot of us have to do that where we've actually been disenfranchised.
We no longer have the choice of a true sort of libertarian party.So instead we have to decide which of the two parties is least socialist.Unfortunately, they both are.
Yeah, I think we have a similar problem in the UK.Although I don't think the education around the ills of socialism has been, you know, we didn't fight communism across the world like the US did.
So socialism is still seen as a good thing by a lot of people in the UK.But both parties have essentially come to the middle.I mean, they're both essentially high-tax, high-intervention, surveillance operatives.That's what we have, both choices.
The vote, I really think, comes down to, the ideology's been lost.The vote now comes down to, well, they were terrible, will these be better?
So we had a huge number of people who were just so sick of this conservative government with no conservative principles left anymore that they voted for a
a Labour government, but this Labour government is so ineffective in its first 100 days, their popularity is already, they would, it indicates if there was another election today they would lose.
Because they've come in and all they've done is talked about higher, more taxes, after a previous administration which is higher, more taxes.And I'm sat there going, how do we, how do we, how do we break this cycle?Because it's,
It's to the point where it's hitting people so hard.I'll give you an example.I've talked about this a few times.I am about to open a little cafe in the town, right?And I have to pay business rates to open that.That's my tax before I earn money.
It's about $16,000. I have to pay—if I do make a profit, I have to pay high taxes.They're bringing in new employment laws.
One of the things they're talking about reducing is in the UK, if somebody hasn't been employed for two years, you can kind of get rid of them without any reason as long as you've not discriminated. It's essentially a two-year probationary period.
They want to strip that down to, I think, like nine months, even six months, zero contract hours, get all full employment, right?So, they're essentially making this almost a bit like Argentina.
They want to make it more and more difficult to get rid of people.I prefer the US system.If someone's shit, just get rid of them.So, you've got all these pressures on employment.
Also, even if you're zero contract hours, you have to provide holiday pay.Also, you have to provide maternity pay, all those things.And on top of that, If you luckily make some profit, you will pay corporation tax.
And then if you do have something left, and you pay a dividend, you pay the dividend tax, and on top of that, if you choose to save it, and you make any profit, they talk about raising capital gains tax from 20 to 39%.
And it gets to the point you go, can I be fucking bothered?Can I be bothered?Right.Well, you saw Jeremy Clarkson's show, of course.Yeah, I mean, somebody told me, said, Pete, watch this.
His experiences reflects exactly what you're going through with everything you're trying to do in your town.
It's just so much into it.I mean, he didn't build that building and they had to change it because of the roof.
Yeah, right.And it's like they were hunting him down.They were just trying to find a reason to destroy jobs, destroy, you know, local produce.And I mean, he was he was doing God's work according to their rhetoric.
He was locally sourcing goods and he was bringing back British farming, which has been in decline.I mean, he was doing everything.He was ticking every box.It's not like he was Google gentrifying San Francisco or something.
I mean, he was doing everything he's supposed to be doing.And look at what he ran into.And you, I mean, starting a cafe in Bedford.
Well, the first thing is with the football club.We've had so many issues with the local council and the football club.All we want is an extension to the lease. The brand new mayor made the decision he didn't like us and wanted to get rid of us.
Then he offered us a leased section but tried to ban women from playing football.He's never come to see us play.And we sat there and went, look, just hold on a second.You have to understand, this club is followed internationally.
We have people from all around the world coming to Bedford. Our little town, there's no reason to visit Bedford.Spending money.Spending money, staying in the hotels, going to the restaurants.We put on a conference, we filled every hotel in the town.
Every hotel room was sold out.You couldn't get a room.The restaurants were full, the cafes, you go and speak to the local businesses, they were very grateful.
I said, we've got attention around the world, we've now got investors, we've got billionaire investors.Cameron Tyler Winklevoss, we're covered in the press. This is good for the town.This is objectively good for the town.
On the back of this, we've invested in women's football, we set up a fund, where we took the profits from the event, and we now support local kids who are talented, who want to do certain sports things, and their parents can't afford it.
Like, we're objectively good for the town.I would have thought the mayor would say, come in and talk to me.How can I help you?
And there are governments that do that.Singapore famously, they have a department that sits down and if you're going to invest in Singapore, if you're going to start a business in there, they sit down and they say, how can we make this easy for you?
Here's the different permits you're going to need.Here's the different regulations.They have people who sit there and help you get through this.
And for all the money we pay in taxes, you would think that maybe, right, because that's something that pays back to the community, right?
So if they can help you set up a cafe or if they can help you get, you know, promote the football club, then this then, you know, this brings things back to the community.
It becomes this dynamo where, you know, if you bring in a certain amount of business, tourism, for example, that's gonna start a bunch of little cafes and little businesses and, you know, little trinket shops.
And then, word starts spreading and people say, hey, Bedford's really cute.And then people start coming up for the weekend from London, right?Once that starts happening, it can sustain itself forever.
And then you have this gorgeous, beautiful town, the property values go up, there's plenty of jobs, people can actually stay in town, right?Their kids don't have to run off to London.
So there's all these wonderful things that happen, but it takes that spark, like you have to plant the seed, and for all the crap, for all the money you pay for all these government services, not only do they not care about helping you plant that seed, they don't know how.
I mean, these people probably have degrees in social work or, you know, maybe law or, I mean, they-.......................................................................................................................................................................................................
All right, you're not gonna lose your mortgage, you're not gonna lose your life savings, you're not gonna have to work on weekends and three in the morning.
They have no idea how hard it is, and so they just roll in here, these arrogant pricks, and just put barrier after barrier in front of you, and then they turn around in front of the cameras, and they lament how the streets are empty, and there's homeless people sleeping on the street, and nobody comes, and all the kids move away.
Just drop the penny, people.
We've had a win this week, you'll like this one, I'll tell you about this, but I'm part of a group, I'm trying to inspire a bit of a fight back, but we had this thing in Bedford called the BID.
Bedford Investment Development, or Bedford Development, whatever it is, whatever the BID stands for, essentially it's a quango. So you have something called business rates.So it's based on the floor space of your property.
So the cafe I've got genuinely is about, say, four times the size of this room we see here.I have to pay £16,000.They have this weird rule at a certain size you don't have to pay it, so they've been cutting shops in half, as you would.
So you don't have to pay it, but then your shop's half the size, which is obviously one of those stupid things people would do to get round it.
But they wanted to improve the town so to improve the town they came up with this this big thing Whereby a percent of your rateable value so 2% of what you pay on the rates you have to pay now additionally into the bid and the bid was a Lexus quite go it was
How do you explain it?It was a group of people in office who their job was to raise up and improve the town, okay?So they take the money in and they come up with different kind of ideas, you know, maybe a bit of marketing.
Yeah, I think there's a thing with radios so shops can speak to each other about people who maybe shoplifted.But it wasn't transparent. And because it wasn't operating within a free market, you just paid it every year.Nobody really knows what it did.
Everyone's kind of got fed up with it.And so it became this kind of, it gets voted for.The vote was this week to whether it should be continued.I mean, I went in, there's a big email group, and went straight and went, this is bureaucratic nonsense.
Get rid of it.We can privately organize.We can privately get together and manage the town.It failed.We got the email through today that it's failed.It's going.
And so, I've said to these people, let's all get together, let's prove privately, we as a group of business owners in the town can make this run, work.
And so, that's the next step, is to try and show to them, because the council aren't doing their job.I mean, I went in on them, because we have a problem with crackheads in the town centre.I'm sympathetic to drug addiction, but at the same time,
You walk down the high street, you will see two, three, four each time, and they're going into various shops, stealing, going off to get high.
That problem needs solving because it affects the revenue of the shops, but it also stops people wanting to come into the town.So you need to go and fix that problem.The council haven't fixed that problem.
they've been taking the money from the business rates, but failing to do the things they should be doing in the town.So we've had one small win.Now it's time to go a bit harder.
Yeah, but the larger issue, sort of how we got here, I don't know if you remember, last year they had a G7 meeting out in Europe, or earlier this year, I think it was July.
And it was famous because Joe Biden was wandering around looking at parachutes and everybody sort of followed along behind him.But there was a fun meme at the time where they listed out the approval ratings of all those leaders, right?
So the G7, you've got all the big countries in the West. And Joe Biden was at negative like 19 or something.He was 20 points underwater in terms of approval.So how many people like him versus dislike him.
And the rest of them were, I mean, they were just awful.Canada, Trudeau was like minus 35 or something.I think the Sunak was at like minus 50.Germany was at minus 50.Maloney was the only one who was close to even, she was like minus 10.
The Japan guy was minus 40. And it's weird because, so these are the champions of democracy. The West, we now know, as we all face Putin in the existential battle over Donbas, that these are the champions of the free world.
And if you look at their approval ratings, it does not look like a democracy.The average leader of the G7 is like minus 30.What the heck is going on here?Democracy, you had one job. which was to elect people that the public supports.
That's the only purpose of democracy.It has many, many other flaws, but the one thing it's supposed to get right is it's supposed to elect people who the public likes.And so that to me is kind of the biggest political mystery.
And I think that that's the source of a whole lot of this.And how could that be happening all over the world? Because, I mean, it is open.Anybody can run for office.It's not that hard.It costs a couple thousand dollars.
You and I could run for president.It is, on paper, an open system.And the logic of it sort of dictates that the people who are leaders should at least be popular.Maybe they're useless, but at least they're popular.And in fact, they're not.
And I think that the only solution to that is that the system is so corrupted that it is not, in fact, choosing people who the public likes.You know, if we look at the U.S.
election, for example, it seems like what they do is you have sort of, at the start of the gate, you've got a whole bunch of people who might be popular, and so you've got Bobby Kennedy, gollies. And one by one, the Borg takes them out, right?
It just chisels away at them.I don't know, what did he cut off a bear's head or whatever?I mean, they just dig up crap about each individual one by one until they've knocked them out.
sort of fluff out the candles one by one until the only thing that's left is something that nobody wanted.
And, I mean, Britain, Japan is probably even worse than Britain, if it makes you feel any better, but, you know, Britain, it seems, has reached this point where, I mean, it's gotta be very discouraging for people because no matter which party, right, so you had, what, three Tory prime ministers in a row,
none of whom were Tories in the least.I mean, they were just, it's gotta be just incredibly discouraging.Like it really doesn't matter which party you vote for, the corruption is happening on that other level, right?
When they're snuffing out the candles one by one. And I think it's gonna backfire on them because at this point they've been so successful at it that indeed voters are just absolutely disgusted.I think they're disgusted in Britain.
I just came from Japan and it's very similar there.So they had a failed prime minister.He had an approval rating of 15%, one five. in a democracy.It's pretty impressive.
And so now they've got a new guy in there, and guarantee you in a couple months, he's gonna be down in the 20s again, because that's, you know, their system is so, I mean, Japan is extremely corrupt in the political system.
And they have the same thing on steroids.So by the time that you manage to get in the running for Prime Minister of Japan, you have snuffed out so many candles that you're this very, very limited population of safe,
You know, you're sort of calming to the geriatric overlords of Japan who mismanage it.And the end result is that the people effectively have no choice, right?
The choice has been pre-made for them so that by the time that they get to go to the polls, they're choosing between, out of the thousands of beautiful candles that were arrayed on the table, there's just two left that have not been snuffed out by the system, by the money fundamentally, and then they've got to choose between sort of the lesser of two evils there.
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Because the way I look at it is, the Conservatives tried austerity.It was hugely unpopular.And look, I don't think they did it in a particularly good way.But they recognized at one point, we have too much debt.So we need austerity.
It was hugely unpopular.I don't think it's particularly easy for any government to come in and say, hey, by the way, vote for us.We're going to cut public spending.And we're going to reduce the debt.
And it means we have to cut a whole bunch of services.
That's where I think the problem is, because then a party comes and goes, fuck, we've got this bloated state, we've got this bloated NHS, we've got to pay for everything, our tax receipts are going to be about a trillion, it's currently costing 1.1 trillion, and so our options are, it's like, we have to raise taxes, which is going to, it's not going to stimulate growth as they think, or we have to borrow more money, which is going to drive inflation.
They're kind of stuck in this place where they don't have any options. I mean, for me, it requires someone to come in with integrity and a backbone and say, we have to make change.But it feels like nobody has any ideas how to change it.
Although, also, they all seem economically illiterate.
Yeah, and right, I think it's a debt problem in the sense that it's the size of government problem.And then the debt itself is downstream of that.And part of that, or I think a lot of that, has to do with the money.
So traditionally, the gold standard was a big constraint on how big government could get. If government was limited in size, then they could take care of the important things.
They could clear the potholes and tend to the streetlights, but they didn't have the money to go into all these government initiatives.They didn't have the money to harass people.
So if you look back at 1910, before World War I, the British government was very, very small.It was much smaller than the French government, for example, as a size of GDP.
And you see it in government buildings from that era, sort of government construction.They were beautiful, but they were small.
I mean, it was very, very different than the empire that you see today in Britain, certainly in the US, where you just have miles and miles of these massive buildings.You wonder, what do those people do in there?
And a lot of what they do is sort of hunt down the remnants of the private sector.They destroy jobs for a living. And then that leads to all these other social pathologies.But this is part of why we're so interested in Bitcoin, for example.
I mean, really, in hard money, right?Is that that can limit the resources that government can take.
And if we sort of go back to, at least in the US, the source of the problem, and again, a lot of these processes, they really happened on similar timescales across the West, so also in Europe and in Britain.
But if you go back to 1913, the two key elements of that government growth, of that sort of cancer, were the income tax and the Federal Reserve, so central banking.
And those have, I think, sort of had similar dynamics across Europe as well, where governments have just grown massively.Of course, in general in Europe, they've grown even larger than they have in the US.
and that's choked off growth, that's choked off jobs.If we look back to, even as recently as the 1960s, in the US anyway, it was typical that your children would make two to three times what you did.
And it was standard that old people would sit around and they would just be amazed how easy you guys have it, right?Oh, when we were kids, we walked uphill both directions.That's flipped.It's completely flipped.
Now you've got these boomers who are sitting there in their oceanfront mansions, sort of peeling off $100 bills for the kids and telling them to get a job.
I mean, things have completely flipped, and I think that's exactly the reason, is that the government has grown to the point where it has choked off the private sector, and increasingly, you know, a lot of what prosperity we do have is sort of perversely funded by government, right?
Coming back to the austerity question, where, you know, in a sense, there are millions of jobs now that are dependent on government payouts.
The problem is that those government payouts are either dependent on inflation, or they're dependent on tax rates that are so high that they end up wiping out the other jobs.
So the jobs that are lost, all those jobs that used to double or triple incomes and don't anymore, because it's a massive number of jobs, those are all gone, we can't even see those.
What people can see is the parts that are linked to the austerity, so government funding for for agriculture, for really everything across the board.
People can see that part of it, but they can't see the other parts that all that government spending has wiped out.And historically, how do you get out from that kind of doom loop?I mean, the most common historically is you don't get,
politicians with spines and said they just kind of let it go off the cliff, you get a crisis, and then during the crisis things get fixed.So this is the Soviet solution, the former Soviet solution, where they had some reform, to Gorbachev's credit.
He did try to free some things up and allow small-scale production.But, I mean, It was too little, too late.The system collapsed.They essentially just wiped it out, threw it away, and started over.
And if you look today, Eastern Europe is, I mean, in many ways, I think it's a lot more successful.If you walk through the city centers in Poland or Hungary or even Russia, despite the sanctions.
Latvia, Lithuania, I've been to Estonia.I mean, Estonia is incredible.
Yeah. Yeah.So maybe it's a silver lining, that worst case scenario, they just drive it off the cliff and then we do in Eastern Europe.But it would be really nice if we could fix it before then, you know, head it off before it gets into crisis.
And the problem there is that You know, if you look at politicians in most countries, it is much, much easier to kick the can, to just keep things going.
When fires crop up here and there, you just, you know, shoot a trillion dollars at it and hope that you can make it go out.You know, if you have some banks go down or if you have some...
some job crisis, then you just shoot a bunch of money at it and hope you fix it, which of course accelerates the collapse, but that's been the pattern and that's probably going to continue unless we get some politicians with serious spine.
But is it, in the circles you mix in, and I've spent some time with some libertarians,
And some of them are, I would say, on the more, I don't want to say extreme, because that sounds like a pejorative, but on the more blunt end of libertarianism, it's just like, rip off the band-aid, cut it all off.
But I've considered, for example, running for mayor, where I live in Bedford.And it's like, what are the differences I can make?And I know I can't get rid of child protection services. A lot of the welfare is going to be very difficult to get rid of.
So, really, the area that you complain is quite limited.There's things you can do, of course, but it is limited.And also, I don't, you know, whether the libertarians are right or not,
The ideas of Austrian economics aren't really broadly well understood.You're a niche group, you know.So, to make change, you have to sell something in.So, is there any kind of thought into kind of nudging things in a different direction?
you know, people like Ron Paul, if we got more Ron Pauls, if we could, you know, if we could educate people about how the economy actually works, how government can function.Is there anything done there?Has anyone got any sense of what it is?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who try to engage in education, and to be fair, I think that we are making a ton of progress.Murray Rothbard, who's an Austrian economist,
In the 1970s, he said that you could fit the entire liberty movement in a single living room in New York, which I think was true.
And thanks to the internet, thanks to Elon Musk, to a large degree, thanks to many of us who are out there spreading these ideas, including you, you are a force for liberty.
Whether or not you accept it?No, no, you know I have accepted it.I think it took me a few years to really understand it.I couldn't just agree with people because they told me.And I think that I really understood it by running businesses.
You know, I've seen the council come after me, or the mayor come after me, or seen the regulation that's choked what I'm doing, or the taxes.And now more recently, with my football club, I've been charged by the FA for a photograph in a program.
I'm seeing the attacks on liberty.And I think economic tax are attacks on liberty as well.And so, having lived that, yeah, I'm on the team.
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of replacing high school with give every kid 20K and have them start a business and just let them see how the real world works.Yeah, I think that would do wonders.But yeah, I think we are winning the battle for hearts and minds.
And you can see the evidence, right?If you look at faith in institutions, for example, faith in the news media, faith in the government.In the US, for example, up until,
Around the 1960s, the vast majority of people in the US, they just absolutely believed the government.If the government said it, it was gospel truth.Faith in government was like 80, 90%.
You still see it in these remnants where, I don't know, you'll read like in a magazine, they'll be like, even the department of XYZ thinks that this is a crisis.
You see sort of these throwback remnants to this sort of lost age when people actually believed in this crap.And now the majority in the US don't believe what they hear anymore.I think that's absolutely glorious.
I think we're getting there in a number of European countries even where traditionally places like Finland or Germany, there's been a lot of faith in government's truthfulness and even that's breaking. So I think that we are making a lot of progress.
Now having said, in terms of policy, I'm completely with you that you have to take things incrementally.Like if you go, if you try to abolish child services from day one, that may be philosophically the correct thing to do.It may or may not.
I mean, personally, I think, of course, government has no say in that kind of thing.You should leave it to the tort system.But at any rate, that's not necessarily what, you're not gonna win if you do that from day one.
And there's an instructive moment, I think, which is during the 1700s, so immediately preceding the French Revolution, they had a prime minister in who was extremely laissez-faire, very small government, and he just came through and cleared out the economy.
I mean, it was glorious, right?This was exactly the sort of dream scenario where he didn't wait for the crisis, he just cleared house.
And of course, if you do that all at once, then you've got millions of people who lose their jobs because they were living off taxes.
And yes, you want to fix that, but you don't necessarily fix that all on one bright Tuesday, because if you do, then now you've got this huge reservoir of dissatisfaction.
And of course, that led to the French Revolution, and all those people lost their heads.So it was, and the regime that followed once the revolution happened was, I mean, it was peak communism, right?It was much, much worse.
than the government system that existed before that.So I think that one does have to be careful.You want to go with the low-hanging fruits.Probably one of the most attractive is you stress government inefficiency.
Government will always be inefficient, it will always be corrupt, so you want to continually pound on that from sort of a PR perspective, just remind people exactly how corrupt the government is.
how it is not serving you, it is serving yourself, it's serving itself.And then the other aspect that I think you really want to pound on is taxes.And specifically taxes for the poor, I think is how you go in.So the poor, the working class.
Trump has been good at this.He's been emphasizing, he wants to get rid of taxes on tips, taxes on overtime, basically any kind of tax that's sort of sticking out.He says, go ahead and get rid of that.And the attraction there from a sort of
You know, you might criticize that kind of thing as gimmicky, but the thing is, first off, anything you can do to sort of starve the beast, right?So if you can remove resources from the other side, then that can shrink the government.
But it also sort of frames taxes, right?It reminds people, like, why taxes are a bad thing.It, to be frank, bribes them into the movement, which, I mean, the other side does that all day long, so I am not below bribery.
you know, tempting people into the movement by reminding them that their taxes can be quite a bit lower and, you know, connecting to exactly what the money is spent for, right?
So you say, so here's the deal, we're not gonna be able to invade Iraq or do whatever it is we're doing in Ukraine, but you don't have to pay taxes, right?So that's very, very appealing to people.
And a lot of libertarians, they complain that, you know, the other side can buy votes and we can't buy votes.And I'm like, what are you talking?The government takes half of everything we own.We can buy votes.Just say we're not gonna take it anymore.
So I think that those are, you know, taxes are, they hit the bottom line for people.They are resonating at the moment because the economy is slowing to such a degree, it's slowing in Britain, it's slowing in the U.S.So I think that people are very
open to that, and it stays away from those philosophical questions like, should we have a police department?Okay, that's fascinating down the road.
But first, let's say shrink the government back to 1910 level, so that would be about 10 times smaller than it is today.Let's get them out of the money business.There's a couple of really big reforms that would
have a lot of leverage, so first let's shrink it to that, and then we can have the philosophical discussions about the bottom-up justices and this and that.
Police and fire service.Yeah, right, exactly.And the roads.Always the roads, yes.
We can do the roads last, I think. There was a story of a British guy, you might have heard of this.
They were doing road construction on one of the big highways, and it was taking years and years, and so people had to drive like 20 minutes out of the way.
So this guy laid down his own road, and it was like 150 meters or something, and then he charged two pounds or something to go over the road, from memory.And he, I mean, people just loved it.
Right, so they could skip this whole- When did they close him down?This whole roundabout.Of course they closed him down, that's right.Yeah, he ran for a couple months and then, I can't remember if they seized it or if they simply closed it down.
It would sort of be more on brand to just close it down and put up barriers.
I'm pretty sure we only have one toll road in the country.Uh-huh.Yeah, so we have this, the M1, which is the main spine motorway.Yeah.
And before Birmingham, it connects to a thing called the M6, which goes up and around to Birmingham, if you want to go up to Manchester.But it's kind of, it's almost like it goes up like a right angle.
And Birmingham always, the traffic was just a nightmare.So they built something called the M6 Toll, which cuts that corner off.And it's like seven, eight pound.Everybody uses it.
Everybody uses it to cut that corner off because that seven, eight pound is worth saving an hour in traffic.
You would think they would get a clue out of that and maybe build more of these things, because of course the tolls pay for the road, and so then regular people eventually get the road for free.
You know, you do something like 20 years of tolls, that pays for the road, and then everybody gets a free road.This is how Florida does it.We have gorgeous roads, they all start out, they're all born as toll roads.Are they private roads though?
I'm pretty sure they're State Road, sadly.But still, the thesis is correct.We're only part way there.Yes, this is the gradualism, yeah.
So what are those big failed institutions that you can get rid of?Like your typical libertarian in the Fed, is that a realistic that you could implement quick.
Yeah, you could absolutely get rid of it quickly.Andrew Jackson did in the 1820s.He literally banned the thing.And the main function of the Fed, outside of printing money, is bailing out banks.So this is not a function that actually has to exist.
You would, because of that, need to give it a little bit of lead time, right?So this kind of goes back to the NECR during the French Revolution.
If you announce tomorrow that the Fed is not going to be bailing out any more banks, then yes, you will have a massive financial crisis the likes we have never seen.We saw this in 2008, right?In the 2008 crisis, you had
Really what made it a crisis is that Lehman Brothers collapsed and Wall Street expected that they were gonna get bailed out.And W stood up and said, no, this is the free market.If you make the money, you keep it.
If you lose the money, you also lose it.And he stood up for principle and God bless him.It was dumb, but he did it for the right reasons.And of course, all of Wall Street just woke up and was like, holy crap, you serious?
We're not gonna get bailed out? And at that point, all the counterparty collapsed around it, right?So you can't end the Fed tomorrow.
I mean, you can, but all of your banks would collapse, they would go to zero, and then they'd be acquired probably by Canadians and Warren Buffett.So it is possible, but you would have a massive financial collapse.
If you give it five, 10 years notice, the banks would have to scramble to get their balance sheets up to the point where they wouldn't need bailouts.Yes, you could definitely do it with the Fed.Other agencies are a lot less trouble.
If you got rid of the Department of Education, my personal favorite is just get rid of the Department of Defense, maybe keep Coast Guard and Border Patrol.The US is functionally an island. in my opinion, ocean-going vessels.
So you get rid of that one, that's around about $850 billion a year.Most of health and human services. That's more complicated because a lot of people have paid into those.
So, in the US, as in, I imagine, Britain, a huge chunk of the government is effectively welfare.And a lot of that is medical payments.And that, I think, is hard to get rid of immediately.
I mean, like, you wouldn't want to because a lot of those people would genuinely be victimized.If you tried to do that, it would blow up in your face because normal people are not gonna be down for that.
So I think for those, you've generally got to ease them out.
If you take Social Security, for example, the solution there is relatively easy, but it would cost a lot of money in the transition, which is that you essentially give the money back to the people.
So we have 401ks in the US where you have a retirement account and you invest it, right?You also do this with IRAs.So Social Security should work like that.
Now you've got a bunch of people in the middle where they would still have to receive government money. because they don't have those balances built up over time.But social security is relatively easy to fix.Medical in the U.S.is a bigger problem.
The U.S.is actually funny.So we have every single socialized medical system in the U.S.at the same time. All right, so the British system is the VA system, right?
Which tens of millions of Americans belong to that, and is identical to the British beverage system.The German system exists now in Obamacare, right?Medicare, Medi... CAID is full payment, so that's the Canadian system.
Medicare, I don't remember which one Medicare is, maybe French.Every single version of socialized medicine coexists in the U.S.And I think this is surprising to Americans.
The vast majority of Americans are covered by one of those socialized medicine systems.There's really nobody who is uncovered in the U.S., or there is literally nobody who's uncovered.
If you are homeless and you walk into a hospital in the U.S., you will get care.The care will be absolutely top flight, better than just about any country on Earth.The U.S.has very, very good medical care.It's expensive, but it is very good.
So if you are homeless, if you are penniless, if you are a penniless foreigner, you can walk into a hospital, you will get free treatment, you will get billed nothing for it, that is Medicaid.So I think Europeans do not understand this.
No, I didn't know that.Yeah.Because I had to go to a hospital once and I did get a bill.
Yeah. You ignore it.Oh, no, I did that as well.Yeah.Yeah.Yeah.Yeah, that's exactly the system, right?Oh, so they say they will bill you but you could just not pay it.Mm-hmm.Correct.Okay.
Yeah, or you give them a fake name if you want.So I was in New York years ago and I injured my leg and I went to a hospital and then I got the bill and I was filling it out at work.My co-worker looked over my shoulder.
She said, what are you doing Peter?I said, I'm paying my hospital bill and she's like... He's paying his hospital bill.She thought it was the most hilarious thing.She'd never seen anybody pay a hospital bill, and so I didn't.
So you don't have to either?Functionally, they don't do anything to you.It's kind of stunning.Does everybody know this?I didn't know it when I was living in New York.Is this only for emergency scenarios?
I think, so nowadays I do pay my bills, or specifically I get insurance so that I can head the bills off.So I wouldn't necessarily do it as a life strategy.
But if you're homeless, right, or if you're traveling in the US, I mean, absolutely ignore your bills.
Because I know of people who've had medical bills that have nearly bankrupted them.Yeah, right. but they could just ignore it.
You can ignore it or you can call them and work out a payment plan.So, you know, what, years ago, our kids were born prematurely and I think the bill was like half a million.Holy shit.
So we called in for a payment plan and they wanted something like $50 a month.Yeah, we'll pay that.So what you're effectively doing is permanently postponing a half million debt until you die in exchange for 50 bucks a month, right?
So is that why they, so this just sounds to me like the U.S.system's too complex.
It's very complex, and it's extremely expensive, and every single one of those layers is lobbied to high heaven, and so, I mean, it's just, the more you dig into it, it'll make you sick.You've got something in the U.S.called con laws.
If you want to start a new hospital, then you have to get approval from all of the existing hospitals in your area. In other words, your competitors, who you're going to be taking business from.Who are going to say no?
Yeah, of course they're going to say no, right?And CON is Certificate of Need, I think it's called.The idea is that the other hospitals will decide whether this area needs more hospitals.
It's not really free market.
No, it's not particularly free market.So, I mean, the US system is, it's almost, it's like the mutant bastard of socialized medicine is every single one of them plus billions of dollars of corporate lobbying mixed in.
So you've got every single flaw imaginable in a medical system.You've got political corruption, you've got private sector corruption, I mean, just up and down the line.
So getting back to the original question, which government agencies can we remove?
Medical would be a lot of work.Who has got medical right around the world?Have you looked into this?Because in the UK we have the NHS.It's not great and getting worse, but it's a source of national pride. Everyone loves the NHS.
Even though, waiting this for years, and a lot of people I know are moving to private, because the private service isn't that expensive in the UK, and it's infinitely better.At the same time, I don't like the US system.
The US system just seems to be, the insurance is expensive, you have your deductible, and things like, my friend told me one thing, He said he phoned the wrong ambulance when his daughter had an accident, and so he had to pay for that ambulance.
It cost him thousands of dollars, because he was meant to phone a different company.So it's also set up in a complex way for people to make mistakes as well. I don't know who's got it right.
I haven't looked at the Swiss, but they seem to get everything right, so I should really look at that.But do you know if anyone's got it right?What is the theory on this?It should be just fully private?
Yeah, I mean, there are some countries that do a reasonably good job.Singapore, for example.The general principle is that you'll have a two-tier medical system where you've got basic services that are free.
that are paid by government and that are more or less on the British model.And so these will be things like shared wards if you go into hospitals.So you'll be in a ward with eight other people and curtains between you.
And then if you'd like to pay extra, then you can get a private room.And that extra payment, it's kind of the same model as an airplane.So the economy class, they're actually kind of losing money on economy class.They're very, very close to it.
Who's really paying for the airplane is first class. Those guys are paying eight, 10 times more.That's where the profit is coming from.The reason why the airplane is taking off is because of first class.And then the economy is getting subsidized.
So that's probably, you know, I mean of course we go back to the 19th century where Costs were much, much lower.You didn't have insurance in between.In the US, for example, when you had that purely free market system, there's a lot to recommend it.
So for example, doctors did house visits.They also did this in Britain when it was a private system.
And the idea that you would go to the hospital, like people didn't want to go to hospitals because you got sick at hospitals, which is true today as well.
You know, if you go to a hospital, there's a very good chance that you're gonna pick up some infection in the hospital.And it could be quite, you know, it could be bad, it could be MRSA or something.Yeah, exactly, right.
And so, you know, yes, there's a lot to recommend the 19th century system, but even if we don't go that far, some kind of system that has a two tier, you know, Singapore does it well.The German and Swiss systems are also similar.
Well, Obamacare was modeled on that.So, you know, the idea was that, People have to buy insurance, and then how much you pay for that depends on how rich you are.Those seem like relatively, you know, least bad ways to do it.
I know I'm advocating socialized medicine, but, you know, the trick for the US, at any rate, for any American listeners, I mean,
There are so many layers of lobbying in there that, I mean, you almost have to throw the entire system out and just start from scratch.
And if you were to do that and you were to do a system with similar equity to, you know, in terms of taking care of the poor as we do today, then you would probably go with either the Singaporean or the Swiss slash German system.
Lobbying seems to be the most corrupt part of government.
Yeah, well, lobbying always exists.And people go after lobbying, and they say, well, if we can just get the lobbyists out.And look, in the Soviet Union, everything was lobbied.Lobbying is part of the machine.
And in fact, in companies, you get lobbying as well.So if you ever worked in a large corporation, you have wings, and you have one group that wants to do this kind of project, or you have lots of politics inside of businesses.Now, in a business,
because you have shareholders and you have controls, and to a certain degree, that lobbying is suppressed because you have some business goal.Like you've gotta catch the rocket with the chopsticks, and so you can't allow that much internal.
But in government, the shareholder is so remote, Going back to the Pendleton Act, it's sort of intentionally remote, right?
So if the shareholder is the voter and then they communicate to the politician, the politician of course has their own goals in life, they might ignore the voter.But even if they do care about the voters, well then they're up against the bureaucracy.
And then once you're at the bureaucracy, you've got all these layers of bureaucracy in government where the minister of XYZ might say he wants something to happen and by the time you actually get to the end of it, That's the telephone game, right?
Things have just been hopelessly corrupted either from stupidity or from corruption along the way in the sense that every single person in an organization has their own goals in life, right?
They want to get promoted or they want to not work very much or whatever it is, right?They want to curry favor with somebody who...
So, when you don't have those formal controls, which you never ever have those in a government, unless it's a dictatorship or an absolute monarchy, in that case, yes, right?
If you're in Dubai, for example, the Emir of Dubai can decide that he wants something to change in the medical system and he commands it and it happens.And if it doesn't happen, then... people get punished.
So in that kind of a system, yes, a government can work sort of like a business with shareholders and controls and such.
But if we look at the Western systems with all of the quote unquote checks and balances in place, those end up also slowing that process and making it much harder for it to be responsive.
And so at the end of the day, then that brings us back to those approval ratings.
where voters want X, by the time it goes through all of the Rube Goldberg machines, every step of that, what they actually get, they look at it and they're like, this is not what I voted for.I wanted a ham sandwich and I got a rotten potato.
How on earth did you think that this was?But it's sort of built into the system.There's a study, by the way, this is from some professors at, I want to say Princeton, a couple years ago, and they looked at
various policy proposals, and they tracked out public support for it, and then likelihood that it would become law.Okay, and then they correlated those, and what they found was that there is essentially zero correlation.
So if people like something, people don't like something, the chances it becomes law are unchanged.
So again, that goes back to the democracy problem that amid all of the discussion of fixing our democracy and problems with our democracy and Donald Trump and all this,
We do have a core problem in our democracies in the West, and the system's based on it, that they are not responsive to the people.And I think we do have to have a conversation, how do we do that?Now, one way to do it is just shrink the government.
That's my favorite solution.If you get the government out of it, then it doesn't have to be responsive. We don't vote on what I'm gonna have for dinner tonight.If we did, I would get the wrong thing every night.
So instead, we take that out of the political system, and we just say, look, you choose, and you pay for it.Because if I used my food insurance to pay for it, then you can be sure that, again, that would be perverse in many ways.
If government is covering a $100 meal, then I may as well go ahead and have caviar every night, even though I don't really want it, or maybe I'm kind of sick of it.But I would order it just because I could.
So, you know, the idea would be as much as possible bring these decisions back to the free market because the free market does avoid all of those Rube Goldberg agency problems without trying to go in there and fix it one by one by one because we know that
Many people have tried to fix these systems.The US medical system is a nice example.Every 10 years, we've had a major reform where they go through and say, okay, finally, we're gonna fix it once and for all.And they have like 1,500 pages of reforms.
We're finally gonna get this one.And every single time, it gets worse.And I think that that's true across all of governments.If we're trying to make governments more responsive to people, In many ways, it's a lost cause.It ain't going to work.
I think that the only solution is make the government so small, you know, if you get to a future where, like Bedford, for example, the vast majority of the budget is going to fixing potholes and, you know, paying police officers to do, like, actual, real police stuff, like investigate crimes, not.
Really?What do you mean?I don't know about you crazy men.Weird, crazy, crazy libertarian world view.
Yeah.Take a form's definitive, man.
So if you got back to basics, then at that point, I think you do, you fix that telephone game where the people want clean streets, they look out the window, the street's not clean, they call up the council or whatever, and they go down to the meeting.
So if government is small enough, then I think the people actually do get involved, and they get involved in sort of, you know,
the important issues, whereas today, I mean, looking at Bedford, but I think really looking across the West in general, government has gotten so big to the point where it's sort of intimidating for regular people.
If you were upset about potholes in New York City and you decided to go to New York you know, city council meetings, I mean, just good luck, right?
There are so many other activists there who are involved in that process because government or New York gives $10 million to LGBTQ outreach or whatever it is, you've got just this feeding frenzy of activists.
So the, you know, grandmother who cares about the potholes is, I mean, they're just gonna get swamped by the rest of this.So I think that if you shrink down government, you end up fixing a lot of those problems automatically.
which may not be intuitive to people.They might think that a smaller government is actually less responsive, but I think that's not the case.
The smaller government gets, the more responsive it gets because it's not distracted by all these other things.And I actually had a video on that the other day, but I was looking at road quality in the U.S.
And the U.S., blessedly, it has 50 different states. And so there's a lot of areas where you can sort of look at phenomenon and trace out how they play out in each state.
And in this case, you can look at road quality by state, and then you can look at tax take by state.And the funny thing is that the more taxes that a state collects, the worse the roads get. So this is independent of climate.
So like Idaho, for example, has the best roads in the country.Idaho has snow, it has mountains, it's got landslides, it's got all kinds of crap.But across the board, the less money the state is taking, the better the roads are.
And that's weird, right?That's counterintuitive.But I think that's exactly what's happening is that once your tax take goes beyond a certain point, the pothole guys, Now they've got to fight for their budget against the activists.
And the activists, they're Harvard trained, they're fanatics, so they're helping each other, they're scratching each other's backs.The pothole guy, he just shows, he comes to work, he's like, hey, I need more asphalt.You know, he's not an operator.
He can't defend his budget against these other people. And so I think that that's what happens.Government gets to a point where it basically grows into this activist cancer.
And I think that that, if you look at a country like the UK, for example, I think that pretty much describes what's happening now, where the parts of the UK that are doing things are doing crazy stuff that the people don't want.
The UK is not proactively fixing potholes.It's not going out and doing good governance stuff.Putting police on actually solving murders, for example.The growing parts of the UK government are not those good governance parts.And logically,
You know, you might say, well, I mean, the UK government is taking a lot more taxes than it used to.If you look at pre-COVID budgets versus now, I think they've probably exploded 20 or 30%.
Like I say, I think the taxes of percentage of GDP, I think is up from 33.I know this number.I've got it.It's something up like 33% to 41%. in 20 years.I mean, that's a huge jump.
The last time the percentages were this high was, I think it was like in the 70s, where we had a huge amount of inflation.And then the last time it's peaked, I think it was like after World War II.I mean, I'll have my numbers wrong.
But it is like that, and we're approaching the highest ever.And they're looking to go higher.And then you've got Keir Starmer talking about wanting to drive growth.I'm like, how are you driving growth when you're strangling the economy?
and put in pocket money in the, I mean, they spent, what did they end up, 22 billion on carbon capture.Where's that 22 billion come from?How many jobs does that create?Where does it go?
I met this guy this morning, it was quite funny, that you say about the taxes and the roads.I said to him, he was from Portland, and I said, how is Portland at the moment?He said, we've got a homeless problem.I said, it's funny.
It's like I travel a lot around the US. The states which don't seem to tax the least, or tax people the least, are the ones that don't have the homeless problem.
I was like, you know, when I'm in like Texas, or whatever, he said, well, yeah, but when you're in Austin, I said, or Nashville, I was like, yeah, they're blue cities in red states that have a problem.And there's that correlation that exists.
I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person in Dallas.I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I haven't, and I don't know why.I don't know what the answer is.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of that just has to do with the benefits.You've got different populations of homeless in the U.S., right?So they migrate based on where they're... Right.
So you've got one population that is mentally ill, and that's a legacy of, in the 1970s, the U.S.emptied out the insane asylums.That was a bad idea.But they did it to save government money. And so there is a large percent of the U.S.
homeless population that really should be institutionalized.They're insane.It's not humanitarian to leave them the way they are.They're just living in their own feces, and if they were properly medicated, then they could be more or less normal.
So that strikes me as very inhumane.But anyway, that's one part of the population.But then there's another big chunk of the population which I can't remember the data, but anyway, it's half or more, which is essentially homeless by choice.
They take drugs, they have a lifestyle.I'm sure if they sort of zoom out and ask if this is how they want to live their life, they say no, but that's sort of like, if you ask most overweight people, do you want to lose weight, they say yes.
Right, and I would like to lose weight too, but actually, given that I haven't lost weight, I don't want it that much.I want to eat more.Yeah, right.So pay attention to what I do, not what I say.
So in that sense, that sort of homeless by choice population, I'm sure in the abstract they don't want to be homeless, but in fact, they're making choices that continue to be homeless.
And if you subsidize those choices, like if you give them free money, you know, or if you give them free drugs, you know, you let them, I mean, camping on a beach in California for zero rent is a pretty relaxing lifestyle.
Like, there are stages of my life where I would have enjoyed that.You know, just kind of.Stress free.Yeah, exactly.Get high.Yeah, right.It's kind of appealing.
And of course, it's appealing on the front end, but then once you've done it for a couple months and sort of ruined your life at that point, it does get old. But the problem is that it's sort of this, it's like a mousetrap, right?
It like lures them in.And blue cities in the US specialize in that.And so, you know, in Florida, for example, because of the weather, you would expect, so I live in Orlando now, and you would expect that we'd have a lot of homeless.
But in fact, we have almost none. And every time I look out on the street and I see the homeless that are not there, I know where they are.They're out here in Los Angeles.They're in California because they've been paid to come here.
So ideally, you would have a system that does not pay people to become homeless.Maybe you would reroute that money to the people who are insane on the street, who hit regular people in the head with bricks every so often.
So those people should be institutionalized for their own good and for the rest of our good. But that's really how it's breaking down in the US.And I think that Europe is copying our system, unfortunately.
Absolutely is.I'm telling you now.So I've seen the growth in my own little town of Bedford.I've seen the growth in homelessness.And also deranged crackheads yelling at people on the main shops.It feels a little less safe.
I've actually seen for the first time somebody camping on a tent in the town center.For the first time.I've only seen it once, but it's happened.And that's the trajectory we're going.
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London is getting worse and worse and worse.You're seeing tent encampments now.I don't remember seeing them as a kid.Maybe they did exist, but I don't remember it.And obviously, I think there are multiple factors.We have a tighter economy.
We have a changing economy.We have less support.We don't have the no prosecution for stealing $900 of clothes. We're heading in that direction.
You can see it, and you can feel it, and there's nothing you can see that says they're gonna reverse course.
And so, again, I mean, but then I come back and like, all these things are great, I'm with you, let's make government smaller, but like, how do we actually do it?It needs somebody to go in and actually do it.
And we don't, I mean, I've watched the Libertarian Party conference here.Dave Smith's great speech.But everyone's celebrating that Libertarians can't get on and don't agree on anything.
We don't really, we have a Libertarian Party in the UK, I think there's like six people around it. And so if they're the only people thinking of this, but they have no power, how do we ever actually get there?That's the difficult part.
Yeah, so I'm very much against the Libertarian Party.I'm a Libertarian.
Because it's antithetical to being a Libertarian.
I think the Libertarian Party is a great instrument for taking the most passionate 10%, 5% maybe, of the population and freezing them in carbonite, completely excluding them from the process.
You may as well freeze them in ice, throw them in the ocean.I would not be surprised if some communist billionaire funded the Libertarian Party.I think it's an absolute atrocious idea.
Because in the US system anyway, the way that political parties evolve, and they do evolve all the time, they change constantly.I mean, the Republican Party, just in the past 20 years, has changed massively.
It's gone from sort of the country club to working class, and that's a huge change for the party.But the way that it happens in the US is that the parties are very, very easy to infiltrate. and to corrupt from the inside.
And that happened to the Democrat parties in the past 10 years.You've had, you know, the Democrat party in the US is traditionally the party of the working class.So unions, working men, much like labor in Britain.
And I think they both got corrupt in the same way, which is at the faculty lounge. displaced those blue collar working class people and essentially took the party over.
And that's kind of depressing, I think, if you're an old Democrat or a labor partisan in the UK.But it's also, I think, important that that is how you fix parties.
I don't think reform or UKIP was the right approach, because we saw what happened in the polls.And, I mean, I'm not speaking from a moral perspective.I love, personally, Nigel Farage.But I think, tactically, in the British system, as in the U.S.
system, the way that you change it is to infiltrate the parties on the inside, because the parties are generally not well defended. They chase votes.There's at least a substantial part of each party that really doesn't care what they believe.
They just want to win elections.Maybe it's for corrupt purposes, which is better than the alternative of nut job social reformers.But the parties are open to change.
And so I would much prefer in the US, for example, that we shut down the Libertarian Party.I don't care which party they join.I don't care which party you take over.In fact, the Democrat Party is better to take over.It's much, much juicier.
Scott, it's far more powerful.Corrupted with good ideas.That's exactly it, right?
And so, yeah.So, with that caveat, I think that the parties, I mean, they are both changing.I think the Democrat Party has changed for the worse.I think the Republican Party has changed for the better.That's why I'm Republican at the moment.
I grew up as a Democrat. I grew up in Philadelphia and nobody I knew was a Republican.Republicans were alligator wrestling, snake talking.But yeah, the parties have evolved.For me, it kind of gives me hope because I think that
You know, there are, if we take the Republican Party, for example, the energy, I think, is definitely in the right direction.
The conversation in the Republican Party is how to get less government spending, how to engage in fewer foreign wars, which is a big change for the Republican Party.Traditionally, the Republicans are the warmongers in the U.S.
So I think the conversation is in the right place.Now, having said, you know, if we take the Republican Party again, most of the elected officials of the Republican Party are still old. There's still leftovers from the old.Yeah, exactly.
So they're very corrupt.They will dance for military industrial money, for healthcare money, for pharmaceutical money, for everything in between.
So the party itself is constantly disappointing its voters, which is, to be fair, that's pretty much every party on earth is constantly disappointing its voters.
But the energy, at least in the Republican Party, I think the direction that it's headed is the right one, which gives me some hope that
you know, we're not just sort of wasting our time, that, you know, we can see the evolution happening at the top, which is influenced by public opinion, but unfortunately, these things take a long time.
So infect these parties with good ideas, send the Libertarian Party members off.Yeah.We need more Ron Pauls, basically.
Yeah, well, there was a moment, you know, if we look back at 2008, right, 2008 made so many people angry at the US, in the US, that you had, you had two political movements that came out of that.
On the right, you had the Tea Party, and on the left, you had Occupy Wall Street.And there was this glorious moment where I was like, they're going to touch.They're getting so close.They want the same things.
And we had a lot of common ground between the two.And my hope was that we were going to get together, and we were going to fix all the crap we agreed on, and then we could go back to warring afterwards.
And of course, what happened is what happens every time, which is that the corporate media jumped in, and they go with race, they've been playing race.I've been shocked how long they've been milking the race thing.
They've been doing that when I was a kid, like in the 90s.I was like, ah, everybody gets sick of this, they'll see through it, but nope, they haven't. But that's what they did, right?
And so they said, ah, no, no, no, the Tea Party, now they're all racist, they're all Confederate.And so they managed to split those two movements.
And so, you know, rather than it being the 99% against the 1% who were fleecing the rest of us, it then collapsed into the traditional 50-50, or 49 and a half. fighting against each other.And they did it with BLM.
Again, I was hopeful because a lot of people on the right have for a long time said that there are police abuses and police shouldn't have these additional rights.They shouldn't have any more rights than any other citizen.
And so we need to rein in these abuses.And again, I was like, they're going to touch.We agree on so much.And again, with the race thing. Could you at least do it differently next time?Come up with some other division.
But they've been very, very effective at it, and I think that fundamentally that is fueled, that sort of division industrial complex is fueled by so much money.
The reason they do it is so that the oligarchs can stay out of the limelight and they can keep fleecing the people.They do it in the banking, I mean, they do it in every single industry in existence.
And so much money is at stake there that they're, of course, not going to give that up willingly.So at that point, I think the solution is down to people like us. We're more or less alt-media, exactly.
Yeah, and in some ways our voice is getting bigger.I mean, I've got an audience, you've got an audience, there's obviously other podcasts.There are huge audiences that dwarf the mainstream audiences.
I mean, I don't know about the BBC's approval rate in the UK, but I'm sure it's dropping fast and hard.I think people have become a lot more suspicious of a lot of the likes of Murdoch as well now.
And enter the corporate media in their news cycles would be a first step because I think again this goes back to Elon Musk as well.
What he's done with Twitter, which by the way a lot of it I don't like, but what he's done with Twitter and community notes, he's stopping people lying.
Every time I see Elizabeth Warren tweet, I have a look at the community note where it's correct in there.And I think that's It feels like we're turning a ship around, right?And it's gonna take time.
But I think a lot of good can come from a huge amount of distrust.Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, whilst you think it's the wrong strategy, I came out of my discussion the other day with someone who was critical of populism.
I said, populism is a reaction to the market.The free market gives you populism and populism gives you populist parties.But reform took 14% of the vote from a near-standing start.
And I think if we have this huge amount of distrust, the free market is going to require us to have better politicians and better media and better media sources.It moves so slowly.
The slow part is the frustrating aspect of it.Yes.Yeah, I I have hope with the Internet You know, I just read an article yesterday.They were talking about the main newspaper in Fort Worth.
Yeah, which is it's a big city It's like Dallas's Twin City I've been I was there last year.Yeah, it's like fifth largest city in Texas.It's a major city They still take the cows through the city.Don't they they do they do indeed?
Yeah.Yeah And so the main newspaper there is failing, and they were going to reduce the print run to three days a week, and then subscribers were upset because everyone paid the same.Anyway, in the article they mention that they have 27,000 readers.
So that is a small sub-stack. Yeah, it is.Right.So we are blowing them out of the water.They are absolutely imploding.You know, the only reason why BBC or CNN has any viewers is because they have habitual viewers have been watching it for 15 years.
Well, they're subsidized by the cable networks as well.Yeah, right.
But they're even getting a little bit strangled with, you know, you don't go on Hulu or Netflix to watch news.You just don't.
I mean, historically, I mean, my dad was telling me about this, is that when we first got, we called it Sky TV, it was for sports.
And then they put this kind of 24-hour news cycle in, and then they required the news to sell ads, because people were hooked on the news. But they only survive, they only exist because the networks, the cable networks need to have a news channel.
But that, the distrust in that is, I mean, I'd love to know Rogan's numbers compared to like CNN's biggest show.I bet he kicks their fucking ass.We might even kick their ass.
But just moving it slow, man.It's frustrating how slow it moves.I think that's the optimism is just that, you know,
If we go back through history at these periods where governments just become completely, democratic governments become divorced from the people, it does take a long time, it can take decades even.
My hope is that, I think with the internet, it can go a lot faster.Having said, the absolute essential ingredient is free speech. Yes.If you don't have free speech, not only does every fighting chance we have vanishes, we go straight off the cliff.
If we look at what happened during COVID, the only reason I think that the COVID dystopia ended at all, I mean, we would still be there if it weren't for free speech.Free speech, people could
You know, they could talk about the outrages, you know, the fact that you can go to church.Not going to church is something that had not happened since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.That was unimaginable.
The idea that you would ban people from going to church.I'm not personally religious, but that is shocking that they could even do that. It's scary, and I think that that concentrated a lot of minds.
So as horrible as the experience was, I'm thankful for the COVID tyranny because of that, because it showed people in living color that these sort of horrible FEMA camp dystopias that we talk about, we're like an inch and a half away from that.
Well, I think it's even more important for somewhere like the UK because we don't have a First Amendment protection.That's right.And we don't have a culture of free speech like you do here in the US.
And I know there's been some encroachments on it here and you've got certain Democrat politicians talking about the trouble of misinformation and we need to deal with that, which is concerning.
But in the UK, we don't have this culture of, and you can sell in hate speech laws in the UK quite simply.We have got people going to jail now for tweets and posts on Facebook.And look, you can have debates over them.
The one recently of the politician's wife, he was saying, burn down the hotels with all the immigrants in.And then people did try and burn down hotels.Like, I think there's some valid debate there, but general speech.
We don't have those protections in the UK.But it was because of the free speech in the US.Like, I fucked COVID up so much, man.I fell for all the shit.Give me the jab.I didn't get boosted, thank God.But I fell for, oh, I fell for the lockdowns.
And it was only because of what I'm hearing out of the US or people I spoke to in the US.I was like, at first, I thought everyone was crazy.And I was like, no, you're not right.And then I think that that infected the UK.
We now have a lot of people who are campaigning a lot louder for free speech in the UK because we just we don't have free speech in the UK.
Well, it's ironic because you don't have laws protecting free speech the way that we do, but the culture of free speech came from you.Yeah.I mean, like, the... In many ways, UK had the strongest culture of free speech in the world.
Hyde Park, I guess, was... Hyde Park Corner.Yeah, yeah, that was, like, the iconic symbol of it.
So we do have a culture of speaking and culture of talking about controversial subjects.We do have that.And we do have the ability to stand outside Parliament.I can stand outside with a sign that says Keir Starmer is a dick.
And I cannot be, well maybe I can be, maybe that breaks something. What would it be like obscenity laws or something?But generally speaking, I can campaign.It's not like in Red Square where I'll be arrested and beaten up.
So we are better than some places.But there are certain things you have to be very careful about saying. The government censorship isn't the worst one.
It's actually our libel laws, I think, are actually slightly worse because our libel laws can be exploited by the rich.I've been through a libel lawsuit, five years, cost a fucking fortune.
They're also particularly dangerous because that stops journalists.That's one problem independent journalists have.If you work for the Telegraph or the Times, you've got a big legal department checking every word.
If you're an independent journalist, you risk being arrested by a rich person for saying something.
You functionally cannot talk about private citizens. It's very, very hard.You have to aim at public figures.So like, yeah, you can say anything you want about, you know, Joe Biden, Jerome Powell.
But I mean, we saw this with the Dominion lawsuits, for example.Once you start talking about regular people, and the problem is that sometimes regular people are big parts of the story in a bad way.And so you have to be able to talk about them.
But yes, unfortunately, in the US, libel law used to be very, very good. It was extremely hard to prove a case against a media organization.And I think, not being a lawyer, not being an expert, but since Trump, a lot of rules were changed.
I think basically the Borg, they looked at what happened in Brexit and in Trump, and the left wing, statists, deep state, Borg, decided that there was a good chance that they were losing, and they panicked, and they changed a lot of rules.
And one of the rules they changed was that, traditionally in the US anyway, media could basically do whatever they wanted.
And they dramatically changed the libel laws, or changed the interpretation, such that at this point, organizations, including me, I do not talk about private people for that reason, because I don't wanna incur. Yep, it's a liability.
Yeah, I've definitely been a little bit more careful since.I don't want another lawsuit because it's so expensive to defend.
Which is unfortunate because our role is to tell the truth wherever we see it.And that's an important social role.We may be full of it, but the point is that if you have enough monkeys typing on a typewriter, you're eventually gonna get the truth.
And if we're silenced, I think, maybe not me, because I'm not important, but if alternative media is being silenced, then I think that that is a big threat.
Yeah.How's the Libertarian Project in Argentina going?I know you're probably tracking it more closely than I am.I've seen some bits at both sides.
I've seen some data related to when he got rid of rent controls, and that brought the prices down, which is obviously good.I've also seen poverty rates have increased.He got rid of the soup kitchens, and his approvals have dropped slightly.
I say this expecting ripping off the band-aid is painful, but we knew it'd be painful, and it's going to take time to fix, but are you tracking it closely?Because it feels like the most important libertarian project in the world right now.
Yeah, I've been tracking it fairly closely and I think you've summed it up nicely.Tearing off the band-aid is going to cause pain in the beginning. So for example, I would love to fire a million federal workers in the US.
That would, however, create a million unemployed people overnight.And that would raise the poverty rate, and they would have trouble feeding their families, and this and that.
And so short term, yes, things are always going to get worse before they get better.If you're afraid of that, then, you know.
It's like if you have a broken arm, yes, you have to go to the doctor and it's going to hurt when he resets it, but this is the only possibility to get better.The alternative is that you just leave it be.I'm encouraged by what's happening there.
I think that the pain is a lot less than I feared. You know, I was afraid of that sort of French Revolution solution, right, where you come in and you try to do too much at once.Because he's done a lot quick.He's done a ton really fast, right?
So he balanced the budget in nine weeks or something, you've seen. in a matter of weeks, which was shocking, right?They had a massive budget.It was on the scale of most Western countries in terms of GDP.The rent control thing was a big deal.
Some of it he had to do, you know, for example, he had to revalue the peso because the previous government had this sort of pretend rate, and there's a lot of...
Yeah, there's a lot of hidden cost to that and you have to fix that in order to get the financial system to be rational and so prices can can actually be accurate so people can allocate capital.
But the problem is that that required him to immediately devalue the peso.If you do that, then the import prices are going to go up for things like oil and food and whatnot.And so so that's going to make inflation go up.So there were some things that
It's not so much ripping off the Band-Aid as there was a hidden problem that the previous administration had caused.And in order to start fixing things, you just had to recognize reality.And so that made some of it worse.
And of course, you've got this.
you know, entire industry of not just left-wing Argentina media, but left-wing American media included, who are trying to look for every single, you know, they're trying to start every chart in the perfect time that it tries to make it look worse, or, you know... They want it to fail.
They absolutely want it to fail.
It's the same with Bukele.They've done the same with Bukele and El Salvador.
Right.They want it to fail. They'll send a team of reporters to try to find one person who, you know, is sympathetic, who they can hold up as a poster child of, you know, at what human rights cost.
And I mean, really, it's just this entire industry that is trying to taint them.And I don't know why they're picking on them.
You know, like, I can understand why Bloomberg doesn't like Trump, because maybe that's business interests, and, you know, I mean, generally, the Democrat Party's better for big companies, because they have this pipeline of subsidies and whatnot.
So, I can at least understand the motivation, why they attack Trump, and why they attack Republicans.But in the case of, like, Bukele, like, why do they hate him so much?
I mean, what... Is it the media, or is it the institution of government and the fact that he's offering an alternative economic model which might make the IMF and the World Bank irrelevant.Because the US needs them to export its inflation.
I saw that when I was out in Malawi.They literally export inflation to other countries.
And as tools of imperialism.All of these organizations, what, an example is Uganda.So Uganda, last year they had a law that criminalized homosexuality. And Ugandan society is very, very conservative, right?
Like most of Africa, like most of the world, in fact, outside of the West, it's extremely conservative.And so, anyway, they had a law that criminalized various degrees of homosexual behavior. And, you know, the whole world came down, right?
I mean, you know, the Biden administration threatened sanctions, and it was just across the line.And I think that, you know, a lot of these international organizations, fundamentally, they're tools for exporting Western policy goals.
And I think that, you know, traditionally what that meant was, you know, finding contracts for oil companies and things like that.So, you know, you couldn't make... More corruption, just international corruption.Right.
And, you know, I guess on some level you could make an argument that, you know, if the U.S.government is trying to force Mexico, you know, to allow American companies into
into their country, then you could argue that this is good for America or something.But at this point, I think that a lot of those organizations, I mean, I would oppose that, but anyway, you can make that argument.
But I think that what's happened now is that a lot of these organizations, they're simply exporting American social policy. So if you believe in democracy, then you would say Ugandans can choose whatever their gay policy is in their country.
That's up to them.They're a sovereign country.They're not actually a colony anymore.So I think that when it comes back to why do they oppose Bukele, I think that in their mind, they code who's on our team and who's on the other team.
And they have, for whatever reason, you know, they sort of translate these guys into like, he's El Salvador's Trump.And then, bam, at that point, he's on the bad boy list, and then, you know, it's off to the races.
And if we sort of dig down, like, why is that, we can talk about, you know, exporting American priorities, or, you know, helping American companies, whatever the reason is, what it does boil down to is that,
the enormous propaganda power of American media anyway is directed at people according to whether they're coded as on our side or on the other side.Putin at the moment is coded on the other side.You can more or less go through world leaders.
And generally speaking, I think it's in proportion to how obedient they are to American foreign policy.
So if they do everything that a left-wing administration says, a left-wing American administration, then they are the good guys and the entire American propaganda machine is on their side.
Although, having said, you know, you have regimes like Venezuela or Cuba where they actually seem, you know, even if Cuba is defiant of the Democrat administration, U.S.media tends to be very sympathetic.
They sort of cover up the rough bits and, you know. I know things are hard in Cuba, but by gum, they're trying their best.So, I mean, you could just argue that they're pure communists.
Maybe they got brainwashed in university, and so now they bring that into their media organizations.So maybe it's not entirely US imperialism.Maybe it's just literally communism.
Did you see that recent video of Bukele with his soldiers? The big field.Have you not seen it?It's like something from Star Wars.You've got to see it.I'll show you it.Yeah, and they've got the capes.
He's got this new outfit where it's just like, I don't think that's Gucci.I don't know where it's come from.It's weird.He looks very authoritarian with it. look you're going for.He's been leaning into it.Yeah.It's like Star Wars.
You know the, not Darth Vader, you know the kind of like generals.Yeah, right.It kind of looks like those kind of outfits.Yeah.Yeah, but I mean, at the risk of pissing some people off. I like him.
I love the guy, yeah, absolutely.I think, well, I mean, he's got roughly 90% approval rating among Salvadorians.We kicked off this conversation talking about the problems with democracy.He's the one who's got it.Yeah.
If you believe in democracy, as all of the right-thinking people in both of our countries claim, you should be on his side, right?
Well, it's all the 15, 20, 25% approval rating people dislike the 90% approval rating guy.Yeah.
Well, and you know, this is one of the subtext, I think, when people talk about protecting democracy, right?You know, they say things like, you know, we have to make sure Trump's not on the ballot so we can protect democracy.
And it's kind of like, okay. You're using a different definition than I would use.What exactly do you mean by democracy?And I think that largely what they mean is that there's this sort of set of worldview that I would summarize as socialist.
And in their mind, the good people are gonna be running that socialism, right?So the government's gonna take over society, it's gonna make all the right choices.
In their mind, society is like a classroom, where you've got a bunch of psychopathic children who are trying to kill each other, and then you've got this teacher.
who's kind and loving and wise, okay, and they think that the government is the teacher, the people are, you know, them, and so the teacher is going to control them and mold them into good people.
So when they say democracy, what they mean is that teacher fixing the people. And when I think of democracy, I would say, well, no, no, the children are not psychopaths.The children are democracy.Like it or not, they're the ones that you listen to.
The teacher obeys the children, or more accurately, they're not children. So I think that that's what's going through their mind.
And so when they look at Bukele, for example, right, if you look at it from our perspective, you'd say, well, you know, he's got 90% approval.He is democracy.The Salvadoran people absolutely love him.You know, cause you've been there, right?
Talking to regular Salvadorans.They feel safe.Yeah. And, you know, these are working class people.I mean, these are regular, like, taxi drivers, and, you know, pupusa girl, and, I mean, regular people absolutely love this guy.
That is democracy, and so I think that that sort of reveals the disconnect when the sort of institutional left talks about democracy, that they can't stand the guy, right?And they can't stand the guy, I think, because he opposes what that teacher,
is trying to mold the people into.He's not on board with that project.And he's being successful.So they summarize it as populism.
It's horrible that you would go and talk directly to these people and ask them directly what they want and then try to do that directly.This horrifies them because that's exactly it.
They want that intermediate wise teacher and what I would argue to them is, I understand why you might like that.The thing is, every time in history, every time that your wise, glorious, benevolent teacher wins, it goes evil overnight.
Cuban Revolution, Chinese Revolution, Russian Revolution, every single time.Every one of those revolutions, first of all, it went hardcore right wing, by the way.
Every time the communists win, they line the left-wing activists up against a wall and shoot them.Che Guevara famously, he loved shooting gay journalists, specifically because they were gay journalists.Shot him in the head.
They'll still have tattoos of him on them though.
Yeah, right. Every single, you know, the Chinese outlawed homosexuality, the Soviets outlawed homosexuality, you would go to the Gulag for this, right?Every single time they win, they go hardcore right.And the reason is because once you win, right?
Once your communist revolution wins, what are you going to do with people who burn police stations? Are they useful to you anymore?They're a problem, right?They're a liability.So you're just gonna get rid of them.They don't have any skills.
They're gender studies majors who know how to burn police stations.They're a problem.They're not even worth it because they'll sooner or later burn a police station.So you get rid of those.Who do you appeal to?
You appeal to the people who keep things running.Truck drivers, farmers, construction workers. The populists.So even if they win, they're fighting their revolution to get the teacher in charge of the crazy kids.
Even if they win, the populists are going to win through the back door.So I try to shake them, I'm like, you idiots, I am trying to save you.Stop it.
Stand down, let the people speak so they're not so angry, so they can get policy that actually reflects what they want, and enjoy your stolen, you know, your 200,000 government university jobs and all this.
Just enjoy stealing what you have and quit pushing it because if you win, you're going to be up against a wall.Like, cut this out.
Yeah, it goes back to education, economic frameworks, economic literacy.I just think we've done a really bad job of trying to explain to people exactly how this stuff works.Right.But maybe we'll get a revolution, Peter.Maybe we will.
Wow, that went quick.Is there anything we haven't discussed that you... Geez, that did go quick.Yeah.Do you want to discuss?I've not asked you.
No, I mean, I'm looking forward to talking after the election.It looks like it's knife's edge at this point in the US election.
The daily election, is it November?
18th today, so we have, what, 15 days or something?
Is that that close?Yeah, yeah.I mean, as an outsider, I'm going to be sat at home with a big bag of popcorn.It's funny, so I didn't vote in the UK election because I refused to vote to vote for decline.I think they both only offered decline.
I'm not in a place where I 100% think I think, I certainly think a vote for Kamala is a vote for decline.I'm not sure if Trump is a vote for, I think it's probably a vote for less decline, but still decline.
I look back over his administration, like he increased the national debt by a lot, 7.9 trillion.And his biggest one wasn't the stimulus year, it was the year previous to the stimulus year, where he borrowed 3.5 trillion. I don't see him.
I think there are some things that I can understand why he appeals to libertarians.I'm not there yet. I think he's a better option than Kamala.My worry on the Trump side of things is that I think a lot of people play down that January the 6th thing.
I absolutely play it down.I think it's complete BS.
Well, I tell you why I don't, because I think, you know, I've heard the phone call to the Georgia... Right.I can't remember what their job title is.You know, the pressure he tried to put on Mike Pence.
It just, a lot of the behavior felt very anti-American.
So it's a question of your premises, right?So if you think that he lost the election, then a lot of the activity after that looks shady.Because it looks like you're trying to steal an election.
If, on the other hand, you believe that he actually won the election that was stolen from him, then everything that follows looks absolutely logical. In fact, maybe he should have pushed harder.
And so that's the fundamental question is, did he lose the election or not?And I think it's very hard.So in his mind at the time, I think he absolutely believed that he had won the election that was stolen from him.
And so in terms of motivation for what followed, I think that I mean, that was all perfectly logical in his mind.Now, it's a separate question, did he actually lose the election?And there, I am not sure.
You know, if you look at things like, you know, Google tried to do everything they could to try and slant search statistics.
I mean, that was really the height of the censorship on social media, so if you tried to say something nice about Trump, it was getting blocked.
Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of like, shit fucking things that happen.I think of it like this, do you watch boxing at all?I don't.Okay, I love boxing.There's a couple of ways to win a fight.
You knock somebody down and they don't get up in 10 seconds, you've won. You knock them down three times in a round, they're done.You knock them down to the point where the ref thinks this is dangerous, you're done.
But generally speaking, if you go full 12 rounds, it comes down to the judges.And I've sat there and I've watched fights and I think somebody's won and it's been given to the other person or a draw.The problem is you can't do shit about it.
Now, the way I look at it is that I am an outsider, no horse in the race.Every US election I've watched, both sides accuse the other sides of cheating.
Then you see things where like, there's like accusations of vote stuffing and then there's like these videos where these boxes come from.Then you find out the video was fake.Finding the truth is so hard to know.I think
If you think you lost and you think it was stolen, there is a legal process to go through to try and challenge that.I think what happened on January the 6th, and I've seen how people tried to talk him and say, look, calm the people down, he didn't.
I think he wanted that to happen.
I think the pressure on Mike Pence, who I think is a bit of an American hero, and that's been understated, and the pressure you put on the Georgia legislator, I can't remember the person, I just don't think that was a very American thing to do.
I think the American thing to do would be to complain, take it to the courts, and then if you still haven't won, then you have to come again in four years.Otherwise, you're basically sparking civil war.
You're not accepting the result that's been declared.
Well, everything Trump did was exactly what you're describing.So, all of it was in the rules of the game.So, for example, in the U.S., we have electors, and when you vote for president, you're actually voting for an elector.
You're not strictly speaking voting for the president.So you're electing like a delegate and then that delegate then votes for president and Every single u.s.
Election you have pressure including in 2016 the Democrats put a lot of pressure on electors where they said look I know The people you represent voted for Trump, but Trump's a crazy person, and so you have to, it's called a faithless elector.
All right, and that's got a long tradition through American history.So every single aspect of what Trump tried to do after he felt he was robbed of the election was completely in. It was in the rules of the game.
furiously typing on YouTube now, like, Pete, shut up, I need to go and actually do the research.
But yeah, I mean, in my case, when Jan Six happened, I had wanted to go down, I was up in New Hampshire, and I had family stuff, why I didn't go down, and I felt guilty, I felt like... You could have been in jail, man, we wouldn't have seen you today.
I would have been in jail, yeah, absolutely.So, I mean, you know, that... In my mind, so I think representative of somebody who would have gone to J6, even though I was a coward and didn't go.
But what was going through my mind was that we had just gone through an entire summer where they were burning down cities for no reason.And finally, I was kind of like, where are the Republicans?
You know, like, where are we standing up and saying, you know, enough, we're here too.And I was excited about Jan 6, finally we make our voice heard.I felt like the election had been stolen.
And the goal of Jan 6 was to communicate our dissatisfaction and to stiffen the spines of faithless electors so that if they felt like the election was actually stolen, then they would vote the other direction.So that was the goal.
I certainly didn't think I was overthrowing the government.Nobody did.Nobody on Jan 6 was armed.There's like 300 million guns in America.Trump supporters who are passionate enough to go and, you know, to protest, they most definitely have weapons.
Nobody was armed at Jan 6.It was not an insurrection.It was a political protest.
Well, I mean, I didn't use, did I use that?I didn't use word instruction.No, you didn't, but I mean, people do.
I think faith with electors is going to be my research subject on the way home now, because I want to understand it more, because I'm over here a lot, and we talk a lot about these things, and I always want to understand the other, when I don't have a horse in the race, I want to understand your position, I want to understand my friend Mike Brock, who I was with yesterday, his position, because he's very fearful of a Trump government, and so, you know.
Why is he fearful?I was curious.
I think he's more fearful of J.D.Vance and the potential that Trump doesn't survive an entire administration and J.D.
becomes president just based on interviews he's given previously where he seems to think it was like a Vanity Fair interview and something to do with J.D.Vance would be willing to do unconstitutional things to ensure like America
It's footing is right in the right direction.But again, I need I haven't read the Vanity Fair or heard the Vanity Fair interview but You know, everybody I know who is 100% voting for Kamala is massively fearful of Trump.
And everyone who I know is voting for Trump is massively fearful of Kamala.It's like, how can these people be so far apart?
Yeah, which is kind of an unhealthy equilibrium in a country.Yeah, I know.With a ridge of a million guns.Yeah.I mean, to be fair, that's also been sort of the standard for most of American history.
If you go back to the 19th century, for example, elections were very, very passionate.They pulled no punches.It was based on anger and fear and everything in between.I mean, it's tricky.If we look at
If we try to look for periods where American elections have been very polite, they've essentially been one-party rule, like in the FDR, in the period following FDR, so basically in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, elections were relatively friendly, but that was also because we had a unit party.
And so, you know, I don't want that, and so I think it's possible that you have a choice between liberty, which is gonna be a bunch of people yelling at each other, and afraid of each other.
Now, the fear I think that you can, again, going back to a smaller government, right?So a government that can do less is also less scary.
If you look at local elections, for example, don't tend to be so heated because, at least in the US, because cities don't control very much. People just aren't that excited, right?You know, if- We have the same in the UK.
Yeah, if the county executive is in the other party, people aren't afraid of being rounded up and sent to the FEMA camps, right?Why?Because the government is so small, it does so little.
And so, you know, there are periods in American history where, like, the average American did not know who was president, did not care, because the federal government was so remote, who the heck cared?Didn't do anything.
And, I mean, in honest reading the Constitution, the Tenth Amendment actually mandates that small of a government.Like, almost everything that's done at the federal level is unconstitutional.Oh, really?Yep.Okay.
The Tenth Amendment says any powers not delegated are reserved for the states or the people. And so what that means is that the way that the U.S.Constitution works is that it's a list of powers, so-called delegated powers.
And it says, okay, these are the 12 things you can do, something like that.Everything else you're not allowed to do.And it's like post offices and national defense.You can coin gold or silver.
So you can only make gold and silver into money, which is an interesting question.So Federal Reserve is unconstitutional.Yep, absolutely.So almost the entirety of the federal government is unconstitutional.They can make turnpikes, highways, sadly.
The US Constitution allows them to make roads.I mean, I always say the roads is the last one we need to fight over.And I'm willing to accept that.We're going to get rid of everything else, and then we can sit down and we can.
And if that's what the question was, right, If the government minted gold, coins, had highways, and named post offices, we would not be afraid of each other.And we could get there.
That's... There's not much to argue over with those things either.
Yeah, yeah.I mean, people would still argue.Yeah, of course.Any community you're in, if you play a board game, then people are going to passionately debate.So people would still argue.
massively ideological about the post office.
Exactly.And like nobody's afraid of being thrown in prison for something.So I am hopeful that we can get back to that.If we had a Supreme Court with a spine, then we can actually get back there.I mean, there are a couple of sort of glorious
Easter eggs hiding the Constitution, which is that, strictly speaking, according to the Constitution, the federal government is about 20 times bigger than it should be.
The Federal Reserve notes, I mean, the entire Federal Reserve infrastructure is unconstitutional.There are a couple things in there that are pretty glorious.
But, you know, there's an Overton window within the legal system, and, you know, the Supreme Court sort of moves step by step, because they're paying attention to
So we're not necessarily getting there overnight, but it is exciting for the future, particularly in the U.S.And this, I think, is sort of a key point.
You know, I think that the absolute superpower of the U.S., and one of the, I'm from the U.S., but beyond that, one of the reasons I'm so excited about the U.S., I think that our one and only superpower is the Constitution.Yes.
that we're super anti-government and this and that.During COVID, sadly, that did not turn out to be the case.It's not even, I think, our civil culture.I think that the one superpower we have is the Constitution.
And because it's still sitting there, the Constitution in exile, as it's called, I do have hope for the future.
All right, man, well, listen, 15 days, I'll be watching.Popcorn out.I think I'm... All the people I align with are voting Trump. all the libertarians who are willing to vote.I don't know a single libertarian who will vote who's voting for Kamala.
And so, maybe he's the right ticket.We will see.Peter, it's good to see you again, man.It's always great to see you, Peter.Thank you to everyone for listening.See you soon.
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