Speaker 1: I think bitcoin is if someone comes for you, they
Speaker 1: can't mess with you in the same way they can
Speaker 1: with cash. So I think it's very useful and I
Speaker 1: think it's hopeful for liborty moving forward. I think these
Speaker 1: city states are going to be powered by bitcoin, powered
Speaker 1: by just similar type of things that take, as you said,
Speaker 1: money out of the state's hands.
Speaker 2: Multiple generations that have owned a castle or some part
Speaker 2: of land, but there's no income from that, so now
Speaker 2: they own this land. They own this castle where they
Speaker 2: can't even afford to keep it up.
Speaker 1: What happened there huge blocks of land going on an
Speaker 1: ill liquid market for asset that no one wants, and
Speaker 1: it wiped out the estates, but there's no land to
Speaker 1: fund it because it's all been taxed away. And the
Speaker 1: problem with those taxes was it was the nominal value
Speaker 1: of the land, not the income it produced. So when
Speaker 1: they're not producing income and you have to sell the
Speaker 1: whole thing that the states just decayed.
Speaker 3: It takes the assets out of the old owners.
Speaker 1: Who kind of cared about it for the future and
Speaker 1: puts it in the hands of people who don't really care.
Speaker 1: They're going to put a solar farm on top of it.
Speaker 1: It's going to poison the agricultural land, and that's what
Speaker 1: we're saying now.
Speaker 2: I think about sometimes, like, certainly we've sent the middle
Speaker 2: class over to China. We could bring those jobs back,
Speaker 2: but wouldn't that be a kin to putting people in
Speaker 2: the field to pick cotton and strawberries? Low paying jobs today?
Speaker 2: How much would you say it's just times change, technology
Speaker 2: has shifted that.
Speaker 1: I think what you want, though, is you want more
Speaker 1: of those domestic jobs being produced, because not everyone can
Speaker 1: succeed in the knowledge economy. And I think to have
Speaker 1: a thriving internal market, you need jobs for people different
Speaker 1: ways up the ladder.
Speaker 3: But you also don't want.
Speaker 1: To stifle domestic innovation by letting people who have other
Speaker 1: interests take advantage of your market. You'd probably want to
Speaker 1: look at something about a new amendment for voting where
Speaker 1: only net taxpayers can vote. I mean, preferably we're not
Speaker 1: going to have the income tax, but if we are, all.
Speaker 2: Right, Will Tanner, thanks so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Super happy to have you here. And it's been a
Speaker 2: little bit of trouble, but I'm glad we're here. We're
Speaker 2: going to do this show. You have been writing about
Speaker 2: history in a way that's super fascinating and most fascinating
Speaker 2: for me are the parallels that history has with sort
Speaker 2: of what the world seems to be going through right now.
Speaker 2: So I want to talk about that. The way that
Speaker 2: you're able to connect these dots is amazing. Start with
Speaker 2: a big frame. I guess, what kind of big parallels
Speaker 2: do you see with some of the stuff you write
Speaker 2: about history in today?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, there are a couple of things that
Speaker 1: it's all kind of interesting seeing the pattern repeat one
Speaker 1: big thing, and this kind of ties in with one
Speaker 1: of the points I use a lot is for whom
Speaker 1: does society exist? Is it for the productive? Is it
Speaker 1: for the best? Is it for the people who need
Speaker 1: the most help? I think recently we've seen it beat
Speaker 1: for the people who need the most help, which has
Speaker 1: its advantages and disadvantages, but is a big change from
Speaker 1: twentieth century, eighteenth century, nineteenth century Western history.
Speaker 3: And it's existed before, but it's rare.
Speaker 1: And if you get into why, I think the pattern
Speaker 1: you really see in this thing that's relevant and happens
Speaker 1: a lot is egalitarianism, or this belief that there's no
Speaker 1: difference in human capability between people or between people groups,
Speaker 1: and that if any difference does present itself, it's the
Speaker 1: job of the government to come in and crush it
Speaker 1: with whatever amount of force or regulation is necessary. So
Speaker 1: you see that in the French Revolution, you see that
Speaker 1: in England in the late nineteenth century, and you see
Speaker 1: that really in America starting in perhaps the sixties or seventies,
Speaker 1: but then really ramping up in the two thousands.
Speaker 3: So I think we're in one of those patterns.
Speaker 1: Where it's the battle of egalitarianism or hyper egalitarianism versus
Speaker 1: you know, human capability and technology gives us such ways
Speaker 1: to express ourselves and show differences in human capability. We're
Speaker 1: really seeing that struggle now, and I think it's a
Speaker 1: struggle we've seen before.
Speaker 2: You referenced mostly sort of newer history, French Revolution and forward.
Speaker 2: So does that seem to be more a symptom of
Speaker 2: like a fluence, Like maybe when you've sort of gotten
Speaker 2: rid of the base needs that then those types of
Speaker 2: things become an issue. You know.
Speaker 1: I think I just happened to reference more modern history
Speaker 1: because there's so many more sources that are far easier
Speaker 1: to read. Okay, if you want a more ancient example,
Speaker 1: and I think you're right that affluence makes this a
Speaker 1: bit deal where it presents itself more frequently. But if
Speaker 1: you want an older example, you can look at the
Speaker 1: egalitarianism under despotism of the pre Indo European European societies
Speaker 1: Katul Hayuk. I think as I pronounced it as one
Speaker 1: of the more famous ones, but everyone just lived in
Speaker 1: these horrid, Favella like worlds. These cramped cities were disease.
Speaker 1: Disease was rife and spread it quickly, and the invaders
Speaker 1: that stamped a lot of that out were very hierarchical,
Speaker 1: and it was this long centuries long battle between the
Speaker 1: two groups. Would this pastoralist society from the step which
Speaker 1: we've seen in history, repeat itself a lot when and
Speaker 1: the hierarchy that it carried with it when and the
Speaker 1: sky got it carried with it whin Or would these
Speaker 1: despotisms and other than the king at the top, the
Speaker 1: galitarian society completely beneath him, Is that what would win?
Speaker 3: So we've seen the fight before.
Speaker 1: But I think you're right that affluence both makes the
Speaker 1: cycles quicker and makes it a little bit easier to see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like maybe once you're not so concerned
Speaker 2: about having enough food to live, for example, then you
Speaker 2: can start to worry about other people, right, and if
Speaker 2: they're equal as equal as you are, right, I want,
Speaker 2: I want to pull on some of these threads, but
Speaker 2: I want to go back maybe a little bit in time.
Speaker 2: So obviously you're super knowledgeable about this. You write about this,
Speaker 2: and I'm curious. Why is it because you're just interested
Speaker 2: in curious or is it because you see like maybe
Speaker 2: there's lessons that we can learn and we could benefit from.
Speaker 2: I'm curious sort of how you guys started diving down
Speaker 2: these deep history rabbit holes and specifically why.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is very random.
Speaker 1: When I was a teenager, I don't know if you've
Speaker 1: ever heard of Soldier Fortune magazine, but it was.
Speaker 2: A folder fortune.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yeah, it was kind of like a military magazine.
Speaker 1: But the guy who founded it, I think his name's
Speaker 1: Robert Brown, wrote a memoir that I found in Bornes
Speaker 1: and Noble when I was just kind of plotting around
Speaker 1: looking for something to do, and read it and he
Speaker 1: mentioned Rhodesia in it, which is a country I'd never
Speaker 1: heard of before. So I went and started reading about
Speaker 1: it and kept reading about it, and I noticed that
Speaker 1: there's this country that was, you know, relatively free and prosperous,
Speaker 1: and really the only difference between it and the countries
Speaker 1: that weren't destroyed during the decolonization push was that it
Speaker 1: was relatively hierarchical and non egalitarian. The rights were respected
Speaker 1: for all, but it was a different society formation than
Speaker 1: we really see elsewhere in the West now, And so
Speaker 1: that got me interested, and I kind of kept reading
Speaker 1: out about it out of personal interest. But then I
Speaker 1: had started to notice that if you look at the
Speaker 1: problems America faces now, the things that really made life
Speaker 1: just awful in twenty.
Speaker 3: Twenty and twenty twenty one for a lot of.
Speaker 1: People, it was this refusal to recognize nature and you know,
Speaker 1: recognize that different people have different capabilities that should be
Speaker 1: cherished and strengthened to the best vability, but certainly have
Speaker 1: to be recognized.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 1: So I started reading more about decolonization in Africa because
Speaker 1: of that, because it's one of these really stark examples
Speaker 1: of seeing this just collapse happen, and we know why,
Speaker 1: and we have all the day a lot because it's
Speaker 1: very modern and very recent result catalogued and them, and
Speaker 1: that's how I also got into the Old World because
Speaker 1: I noticed that why did the English Empire decline? Why
Speaker 1: did it collapse? It was this magnificent empire that lifted
Speaker 1: people out of poverty and squalor for century and at
Speaker 1: one point covered I think a quarter of the world surface,
Speaker 1: and then at the point where its decline began, it
Speaker 1: was gone within a couple decades. So what happened there?
Speaker 1: And I noticed many of the same trends that happened
Speaker 1: in Southern Africa, particularly Rhodesia, happened in England as well.
Speaker 3: And then at the same.
Speaker 1: Time you saw these mass riots, just things on fire
Speaker 1: and politicians having this very odd way. I thought of
Speaker 1: talking about it and so kind of sense the commonalities
Speaker 1: and thought it might be helpful to get deeper into
Speaker 1: why these collapses happened in what ways they relate to
Speaker 1: the American experience.
Speaker 2: Do you when you go back even further, I mean,
Speaker 2: it is the same things that you see repeating even
Speaker 2: back to the Roman Empire. And is it sort of
Speaker 2: like this two hundred and fifty year lifespan of an
Speaker 2: empire or democracy something like that?
Speaker 1: Maybe I think in some ways it is the looting
Speaker 1: of the treasury phase of democracy or a decayed republic
Speaker 1: is certainly something that plays out very frequently, and we
Speaker 1: see that in America, we see it in Greece, we
Speaker 1: see it in Rome, and same with to Piffody call
Speaker 1: it democracy's tendency to choose Barabbas, which is from the
Speaker 1: story of Christ where Brabas was chosen by the crowd
Speaker 1: over Christ when pilot asked who the crowd wanted to free.
Speaker 1: And you see that in Athens, for example, where they
Speaker 1: chose Alcibiades, just terrible expedition to Sicily that really ended
Speaker 1: Athens as this important city state because Sparta defeated it
Speaker 1: because of that. So you see democracy making patent decisions
Speaker 1: frequently and ending empires because of it, which is very.
Speaker 3: Relevant to America.
Speaker 1: I do think though, that the what we call the Enlightenment,
Speaker 1: in this kind of birth of liberalism as a political force,
Speaker 1: it did change things somewhat because if you look at
Speaker 1: you know, say the War of Spanish Succession in seventeen hundred,
Speaker 1: there's not this ideological bent to it about egalitarianism or
Speaker 1: about leveling. And similarly, if you get back to Rome,
Speaker 1: they had conflicts with the Germans and didn't see the
Speaker 1: barbarians on the step as their equals. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: this ideological fight. It was just a fight, as you're
Speaker 1: talked about earlier, to fight for survival. Whereas in the
Speaker 1: post French Revolution, post mid seventeen hundred's world, there's this
Speaker 1: ideology of leveling that's attendant to a lot of conflict,
Speaker 1: and I think it's very hard to detach from it.
Speaker 1: And though that impulse has existed before, I think the
Speaker 1: dominance of it as an ideology and something to which
Speaker 1: just so many people in positions of power attached is
Speaker 1: something relatively near.
Speaker 3: It makes this era different from ones that preceded it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you said that democracy ends a lot of times
Speaker 2: because of bad decisions? Is that? I think you had
Speaker 2: written a piece talking about was it maybe Socrates and
Speaker 2: how they had thought about a democracy? And I think
Speaker 2: you likened it to how could you vote for a
Speaker 2: captain of a ship if you know nothing about saling?
Speaker 2: Was that your writing? But you talk about democracy any
Speaker 2: because of bad decisions? And so is that where you
Speaker 2: have sort of ruled by the mobs, but the uneducated
Speaker 2: mobs who are uneducated and don't understand the situations like so,
Speaker 2: for example, in this last presidential election states maybe one
Speaker 2: of the top issues was inflation. For example, most people
Speaker 2: have zero idea about inflation or what causes it. So
Speaker 2: then how do you vote for somebody to fix inflation
Speaker 2: if you don't even understand what the situation is that
Speaker 2: has caused it?
Speaker 1: Right, one thing that comes up when you mentioned that. Now,
Speaker 1: I'll get to your foot in one second, and this
Speaker 1: just reminds me of it. If you say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: perhaps some there's some people who, because they've been pread
Speaker 1: to rule, they might do a better job at governing,
Speaker 1: at least on the edges, at least comparatively to the average.
Speaker 3: And people say, well, there's reversion to the mean.
Speaker 1: It's hard to do this over time because everyone just
Speaker 1: reverts the mean. And in some ways that's true. You
Speaker 1: revert to the mean of your ancestors. But do race
Speaker 1: horses revert to the mean of donkeys. No, If they do,
Speaker 1: it's very rare. And so I think that's something you
Speaker 1: run into with democracy as a system, is because there's
Speaker 1: no guidelines on who can vote.
Speaker 3: And Athens at least had a system.
Speaker 1: Where if you proposed a law, you did it with
Speaker 1: a news around your neck, because if the chain to
Speaker 1: their current laws were voted down and you proposed it,
Speaker 1: you'd be hanged because they didn't want this constant turmoil
Speaker 1: of law suggestion, which we of course don't have, And
Speaker 1: so republics can mind some of the old benefits of
Speaker 1: aristocracy with some of the other benefits of democracy, which
Speaker 1: I think there's a great mix there. In America did
Speaker 1: it quite well for a period, but mass democracy has
Speaker 1: this problem where that you know, the worst will always
Speaker 1: outweigh the best if their votes are all equal, and
Speaker 1: that's something you really don't want. You want to have
Speaker 1: some limitation that it keeps the vote or keeps the
Speaker 1: ability to steward the wealth and prosperity in future of
Speaker 1: the nation in the hands of people who I think
Speaker 1: have shown the ability to steward things personally. Rhodesia did
Speaker 1: that with property voting, as America and Britain did up
Speaker 1: until the eighteen thirties. I don't think it has to
Speaker 1: be hereditary, but it does certainly need to be limited
Speaker 1: to people who have shown personal a personal ability to
Speaker 1: have the qualities that you want of the qualities of
Speaker 1: people in charge.
Speaker 3: I know that kind of jump around at the.
Speaker 2: End of it and maybe it's more than that. It's
Speaker 2: even skin in the game. It's in centron systems, if
Speaker 2: you will. Right, So, like I used to live in
Speaker 2: a gated neighborhood. I didn't really like the rules they had,
Speaker 2: so I moved out of the gated neighborhood. But I
Speaker 2: don't get a vote in that gate neighborhood anymore. Or
Speaker 2: if I went and rented a home in that neighborhood,
Speaker 2: I don't get a vote because I don't own the
Speaker 2: I'm just renting a home in that neighborhood, and so
Speaker 2: I have no incentive system or I'm not incentivized to
Speaker 2: keep that neighborhood up. So I wouldn't want to pay
Speaker 2: to increase the rates because I don't care what the
Speaker 2: streets look like. For example, I don't care if it
Speaker 2: brings home values down since I don't own a home
Speaker 2: in that area. Because you're trying about some sort of
Speaker 2: a system like that would incentivize.
Speaker 3: That right, and you know, as a skin in the game.
Speaker 1: Example, A Rishi Sunac is the former Prime Minister of
Speaker 1: Britain who did a very bad job of it is
Speaker 1: probably the charitable way of putting it. He's now considering
Speaker 1: just coming to America and going back to being a
Speaker 1: banker here because he's done with politics in England. And
Speaker 1: I think if you're a leader who can destroy the
Speaker 1: country and then just leave and go back to having
Speaker 1: a normal career, someone else he never really had skin
Speaker 1: in the game. How his policies played out or her
Speaker 1: policies played out didn't really matter. Is so could kind
Speaker 1: of whatever could happen, it didn't matter. There's no need
Speaker 1: to steward things. There's no need to plan ahead. Whereas
Speaker 1: you know, when it was the aristocracy or the gentry
Speaker 1: running things in eighteen thirty, if they did something that
Speaker 1: was so bad it costs a revolution, they were going
Speaker 1: to have to deal with that, and all their wealth
Speaker 1: was tied up in a given counties, so they'd be
Speaker 1: done if something that happened. And so you see, I
Speaker 1: think much more reasonable decision making and much more planning
Speaker 1: for the long term. This ability to plant trees and
Speaker 1: the shade of which you'll never sit, but your grandchildren will.
Speaker 1: That's one of the hallmarks of Western civilization, and it's
Speaker 1: something that the high time preference of mass democracy really
Speaker 1: just erodes. So yes, I think you do need a
Speaker 1: way to have skin in the game for the long term.
Speaker 1: That mass democracy as a system generally doesn't provide.
Speaker 2: The high time preference of democracy specifically around sort of
Speaker 2: like a two year or four year cycle where I'm
Speaker 2: here for two years or four years, I see what
Speaker 2: I could do, so maybe I get voted in back
Speaker 2: again and maybe I don't.
Speaker 1: Right, And you see this in other areas of life
Speaker 1: and some America too. A ceo pay is a great example.
Speaker 1: How many just horror stories have we heard of CEOs
Speaker 1: having their compensation based on very short term metrics something
Speaker 1: they get this huge golden parachute, but the company just
Speaker 1: is destroyed in the long run. That General Electric is
Speaker 1: one famous example. They're kind of The oil boom of
Speaker 1: the early two thousands is another with how that played out.
Speaker 1: But you see that just on a grander scale. And
Speaker 1: democratic politics where people don't have to plan for the
Speaker 1: long term, so they don't they plan for the election
Speaker 1: cycle you mentioned, which is nevery deleterious.
Speaker 3: I think dark country when.
Speaker 2: You think about I think you'd written about sort of
Speaker 2: like when you look in through the long lens of history,
Speaker 2: it's typically sort of powerful men that drive drive that
Speaker 2: influence right. So whether that might have been old powerful
Speaker 2: men as in you know, fighting ability, for example, ability
Speaker 2: to conquer, they drove sort of that policy shift. Today
Speaker 2: you might argue that we still have powerful men driving things,
Speaker 2: but now it's more like soft power, right through politics
Speaker 2: but even also through money. I'm curious how how you
Speaker 2: think about that powerful mean driving that narrative, and how
Speaker 2: that shifted over time and why that matters.
Speaker 1: It certainly shifted. There's one I find it very funny
Speaker 1: anecdote about this. Around the first decade of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: the Prime Minister in England was Floyd George, and he
Speaker 1: was creating a large number of peerages, which are the
Speaker 1: aristocratic titles for different merchants and bankers and people in
Speaker 1: England who wanted one and donated a lot to his party.
Speaker 1: And the old Lord, one of the people who had
Speaker 1: arrived with William the conqueror in the Conquest about a
Speaker 1: thousand years before, approached him in the House of Lords
Speaker 1: and was berating him for this and more. George, you
Speaker 1: didn't know the man's background, said well, where did you
Speaker 1: get your title? What did your family do? And Thelloyd
Speaker 1: George said, where did you get your title. The lord
Speaker 1: looked at him and said, with the battle axe, sir,
Speaker 1: with the battle.
Speaker 3: Axe, and left it there.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of a funny story, but it does
Speaker 1: the authority this does right here. Yes, we still have
Speaker 1: it on the wall at oh I can show you
Speaker 1: the And you know, that's a different type of authority because,
Speaker 1: for one, that elite isn't just a rentier class as
Speaker 1: a purpose, and that's military leadership, which it did largely
Speaker 1: exercise around the end of the Boer War, perhaps when
Speaker 1: that ended. There's a long history of suffering and fighting
Speaker 1: and bearing the brunt of the country's foreign adventures that
Speaker 1: had existed for a thousand years, and they continued to exercise.
Speaker 3: So then when they're considering.
Speaker 1: Policies that they have skin in the game regarding that
Speaker 1: both at home with land and taxes and then abroad
Speaker 1: with having to be the ones who are going to
Speaker 1: go fight in Sudan or wherever. And that's a different system.
Speaker 1: Whereas that started to shift, as the story shows, towards
Speaker 1: this merchant class that certainly brought a great degree of
Speaker 1: prosperity to the country and certainly did America Mendling, Chaping,
Speaker 1: Morgan or Rockefeller but it's a different sort of person
Speaker 1: and the skin in the game because the instruments are
Speaker 1: so financialized and somewhat made up, or at least it's
Speaker 1: not a real asset, it's an abstracted one. Their power
Speaker 1: and their wealth is somewhat different, where they have a
Speaker 1: different conception of the state of the country, the state
Speaker 1: of prosperity, and what their duties are, if any, to
Speaker 1: their fellow citizens. And I think that's really the big
Speaker 1: shift you see over time, and it happens again and again.
Speaker 3: Is this old landed elite kind of rule.
Speaker 1: Is it going to be the Rome of the patricians
Speaker 1: and the equities, or the Britain of the lords and gentry,
Speaker 1: or the America of the Virginia gentry that existed for
Speaker 1: a long time, or is it going to be a
Speaker 1: country of merchants and bankers that are very successful but
Speaker 1: certainly have different priorities and different priors that they bring
Speaker 1: to the table. And it's a shift you see repeatedly,
Speaker 1: and I think we saw it in the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: So do you think it's a difference in the type
Speaker 2: of wealth that they have. So you mentioned sort of
Speaker 2: like Richie Suna, who just can move and can potentially
Speaker 2: just take his wealth with them, because you know, whatever
Speaker 2: it's in the markets, as opposed to the class of
Speaker 2: the old who really had it tied up in the land,
Speaker 2: so they got driven off the land, they had no
Speaker 2: more assets, and so today you have this sort of oligarchy,
Speaker 2: if you will. But they sort of have this wealth
Speaker 2: that's like global wealth, and they could just kind of
Speaker 2: go wherever. And you think that's sort of like one
Speaker 2: of the main things that really changes the skin of
Speaker 2: the game, if you will. On that.
Speaker 3: I think that's certainly part of it.
Speaker 1: And I think kind of the other aspect of it
Speaker 1: is if you look at how wealth was measured in
Speaker 1: say eighteen hundred, and the novels of Jane Austin are
Speaker 1: great for this. It wasn't the capital value of whatever
Speaker 1: asset was, whether bonds or land or yeah anything. It
Speaker 1: was the income it produced, because that's what the person
Speaker 1: who held it could live off of. And then because
Speaker 1: they didn't have to worry about having an income, they
Speaker 1: could serve the state and were expected to do so,
Speaker 1: whether it was in parliament or the military. America similarly
Speaker 1: with congress and military that died around the same time,
Speaker 1: the shift transitions, and now we never hear about someone's income,
Speaker 1: unless it's just some ridiculous situation. Instead we hear about
Speaker 1: the nominal value of their capital wealth, right, And I
Speaker 1: think what's implied by that is that it's going to
Speaker 1: be sold, because you know, if it's a I think
Speaker 1: Amazon doesn't pay dividend.
Speaker 3: If you have Amazon stock, you.
Speaker 1: Might have a huge nominal wealth, but you're going to
Speaker 1: have to sell it to get anything out of that.
Speaker 3: And if you're selling it, that means it's not permanent.
Speaker 1: Of course, I think the exception there are bare assets
Speaker 1: like bitcoin, because hopefully I don't want to sell those gold.
Speaker 3: But you know, if it's a financial asset that's.
Speaker 1: Not producing a yield or it's not producing income from it,
Speaker 1: you have to sell it. And as such, your time
Speaker 1: horizons are not infinite. They're not for you know, the
Speaker 1: seven generations down the line. It's instead a much shorter timeline.
Speaker 1: It's you know, what's going to happen in the next
Speaker 1: year or two, because I'm going to need to think
Speaker 1: about this. And I think that is something we see
Speaker 1: with our elite is you know, Nancy Pelosi will make
Speaker 1: a stock trade that everyone hears about or Dan Crenshaw
Speaker 1: will do the same and everyone will hear about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they never focus on the dividends of the companies
Speaker 1: they trade. They're just trading them based on political events.
Speaker 1: And I think we see that a lot. It's the
Speaker 1: sound short term ism that's inculcated by the way mel
Speaker 1: Leftlows measured and the global nature of it.
Speaker 2: Although you have you know, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk
Speaker 2: being the richest man in the world because he didn't
Speaker 2: sell his stock, will trade his stock and he has
Speaker 2: just owned it. Although there are stories of Musk kind
Speaker 2: of being broke and having no money at all. Right,
Speaker 2: I've seen resting stories of that. And then you have
Speaker 2: on the other side, you have you know, not so
Speaker 2: much in the US, in the US as well, but
Speaker 2: maybe over in England as well as like maybe multiple
Speaker 2: generations that have owned a castle or some part of land,
Speaker 2: but there's no income from that. So now they own
Speaker 2: this land, they own this castle, they can't even afford
Speaker 2: to keep it up. So is that just is that
Speaker 2: because the wealth has shipped away from that type of
Speaker 2: asset or what happened there.
Speaker 1: That's a really interesting story. Is so that was one
Speaker 1: of the changes that happened. At the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. Two things kind of came to a head.
Speaker 1: One was the opening of the American Midwest. We don't
Speaker 1: really think about it in these terms, but if you
Speaker 1: look at what the prairie was in say eighteen seventy,
Speaker 1: it was this virgin territory with fourteen fifteen feet of
Speaker 1: incredibly fertile tops where you didn't need fertilizers, you could
Speaker 1: just plow it and plant grain. And also railroads meant
Speaker 1: that you could take that grain anywhere steamships, railroads, it
Speaker 1: could go from Kansas to Britain and the relative link
Speaker 1: of an eye. So this entire half of a continent
Speaker 1: was opened up to grain growing. And I promised the
Speaker 1: skin in your question, it's agriculture history.
Speaker 3: But all this grain was grown.
Speaker 1: And the same thing was happening in the Ukrainian region
Speaker 1: of the Russian Empire to the lesser extent. And it's
Speaker 1: all this grain from this incredibly fertile soil, which meant
Speaker 1: the cost of production was near zero. Because of steam
Speaker 1: and rail, the cost of transportation was near zero. So
Speaker 1: anywhere that up to this point it had some degree
Speaker 1: of struggle or at least had to care about how
Speaker 1: they grew things. Could now just import it. There's so
Speaker 1: much grain that they could just import where people could
Speaker 1: be fed and prices were low, which was good because
Speaker 1: it fed people.
Speaker 3: The problem was.
Speaker 1: Without tariffs, which were called corn laws and died out
Speaker 1: around the end of the eighteen forties, and England and
Speaker 1: kind of similarly elsewhere, although Prussia anyway.
Speaker 3: England I think.
Speaker 1: Is a great example because it got rid of its
Speaker 1: corn laws so its agricultural market was open. And in
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies grain starts pouring into England, particularly the
Speaker 1: end of the saving the end of the seventies, and
Speaker 1: it sets up this agricultural depression because what the traditional
Speaker 1: tenant system was. There's a tenant farmer who rented up
Speaker 1: say three hundred acre farm from the lord who owned
Speaker 1: say three thousand acres, and the tenant would pay rent
Speaker 1: to the lord and then keep the rest of the
Speaker 1: profits from the farm. That worked pretty well when grain
Speaker 1: was a reasonable price. When it became super cheap because
Speaker 1: of imports, the farms died. Both the farmers just had
Speaker 1: no ability to grow anything for profit anymore, and the
Speaker 1: lords who up to that point had been renting the
Speaker 1: land and then serving in the military or parliament. No
Speaker 1: longer had any rents to John, so they started having
Speaker 1: to sell things, their time horizons became shorter. Impaired with
Speaker 1: that were death taxes, because up to this point, death
Speaker 1: taxes had been pretty much gone. They're really briefly revived
Speaker 1: under Napoleon, but because they were one of the most
Speaker 1: hated taxes of the medieval system, just caused Baron's Wars,
Speaker 1: caused all this trouble. The governments had got rid of them.
Speaker 1: They came back around the turn of the century. A
Speaker 1: Winston Churchill and Lord George were largely responsible for that
Speaker 1: in Britain. In America just followed suit with Wilson, and
Speaker 1: death taxes meant that now when you died, you start
Speaker 1: to have to sell land. But land wasn't worth as
Speaker 1: much because of the depression, and so it's this huge
Speaker 1: blocks of land going on an i liquid market for
Speaker 1: asset that no one wants, and it wiped out the estates.
Speaker 1: It's kind of my point. So you have these grand
Speaker 1: country houses, High clear Chatsworth.
Speaker 3: High Cleared was falling apart.
Speaker 1: Before Doubt and Abbey, but there's no land to fund
Speaker 1: it because it's all been taxed away. And the problem
Speaker 1: with those taxes was it was the nominal value of
Speaker 1: the land, not the income it produced. So when they're
Speaker 1: not producing income and you have to sell the whole thing, that.
Speaker 3: The states just decayed. So it takes the assets out
Speaker 3: of the old owners.
Speaker 1: Who kind of cared about it for the future and
Speaker 1: puts it in the hand to people who don't really care.
Speaker 1: They're going to put a solar farm on top of it.
Speaker 1: It's going to poison the agricultural land. And right, that's
Speaker 1: what we're saying now. So they were just taxed away,
Speaker 1: and the depression and knocks them outs with the unintended
Speaker 1: consequences of these policies.
Speaker 2: And that's what we see in the US today right
Speaker 2: where it's like, to your point, they're putting solar panels
Speaker 2: on the land, which makes it more valuable, but if
Speaker 2: you want to farm it, you can't make enough income
Speaker 2: to pay the taxes.
Speaker 1: Right, you know, the American equivalent. One of the closest
Speaker 1: ones is if you look at the main street, tap
Speaker 1: the main street of these towns in the Midwest, it
Speaker 1: used to be these thriving industrial hubs. You know, whether
Speaker 1: it was producing lead pipe or wing nuts or shoes
Speaker 1: or whatever it was, all of that got outsourced because
Speaker 1: of free trade and these different policies. So now where
Speaker 1: it used to be there's a relatively prosperous upper class
Speaker 1: that owned the factories, middle class that kind of did
Speaker 1: the administration of them, and working class that.
Speaker 3: Worked in them.
Speaker 1: All of that was just obliterated by these policies. So
Speaker 1: now what used to be these thriving little towns that
Speaker 1: led to human flourishing, which I think is a end
Speaker 1: goal of civilization within them, oll now there are just
Speaker 1: you know, some people do fentanyl there and otherwise there's
Speaker 1: stumble weeds going through.
Speaker 3: It's really har realic.
Speaker 2: How much of that is policy versus just technology. So
Speaker 2: if you think about technology going back right through history,
Speaker 2: it's always sort of changed the way that we work
Speaker 2: and communicate and organized, change the balance of power, all
Speaker 2: of those things. Right, So, like you have the industrial
Speaker 2: revolution that brought people into cities and factories. Then you
Speaker 2: had you know, Henry Ford created the assembly line, which
Speaker 2: created this massive middle class. Everybody sort of equal on
Speaker 2: an assembly line almost, So then you created this mass
Speaker 2: management system to manage everybody, like a cog in a wheel.
Speaker 2: Then you created like a mass government structure to manage
Speaker 2: all of that. So you have this massive middle class
Speaker 2: because everybody was sort of equal put in their cog
Speaker 2: on the wheel. But now we've sort of gone from
Speaker 2: the industrial age to the information age, right, and so
Speaker 2: now we certainly those those low pain industrial jobs have
Speaker 2: gone overseas to lower pain workers. But in the information age,
Speaker 2: it allows knowledge workers to excel faster because some people
Speaker 2: are just smarter. There's no a dude galitarian, right, And
Speaker 2: so I think about sometimes like, certainly we've sent the
Speaker 2: middle class over to China. We could bring those jobs back,
Speaker 2: But wouldn't that be a kin to putting people in
Speaker 2: the field to pick cotton and strawberries. They're low paying
Speaker 2: jobs today, right? And if so, how much of it
Speaker 2: was I mean some of it was policy, for sure,
Speaker 2: But how much would you say it's just times changed?
Speaker 2: Technology has shifted that There are.
Speaker 3: Two issues there.
Speaker 1: One, you're definitely right that the current like knowledge economy
Speaker 1: of powers the people who are able to take advantage
Speaker 1: of that, which is good and I think a good
Speaker 1: thing generally because people are able to do these things
Speaker 1: they wouldn't been able to do before it costs next
Speaker 1: to nothing to start a business. Now, which is very
Speaker 1: good has empowered a lot of people.
Speaker 3: So I think you're right on.
Speaker 1: That there are just these changes. I think the other side, though,
Speaker 1: is that we still need steel. You know, we still
Speaker 1: need natural gas, we still need oil. In some places,
Speaker 1: these companies are able to thrive. You know, a Germany
Speaker 1: up until the kind of recent unpleasantness had a thriving
Speaker 1: industrial sector alongside its other thriving sectors. And I think
Speaker 1: what you get there, what you got and say nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred in America with McKinley, are policies meant to protect
Speaker 1: the innovative companies that produce these things. So New Core
Speaker 1: is a steelmaker in America that is much more efficient
Speaker 1: than US steel. They use electric arc well, or they
Speaker 1: use electricity rather than coal essentially for their production of steel.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, it makes them very competitive with
Speaker 1: the Chinese market. Say so, whereas a US steel just
Speaker 1: got hammered by these Chinese imports, New Core has been
Speaker 1: able to hold on and do reasonably well. I think
Speaker 1: what you want, though, is you want more of those
Speaker 1: domestic jobs being produced, because not everyone can succeed in
Speaker 1: the knowledge economy, and I think to have a thriving
Speaker 1: internal market, you need jobs for people different ways up
Speaker 1: the ladder. So you don't want these legacy companies just
Speaker 1: being zombie companies and holding on because of tariffs and
Speaker 1: drawing in resources that they shouldn't be. But you also
Speaker 1: don't want to stifle domestic innovation by letting people who
Speaker 1: have other interests take advantage of your market. Like when China,
Speaker 1: for example, is subsidizing it's steel sectors so that the
Speaker 1: price can be much lower than whatever America without those
Speaker 1: subsidies can produce. I think that creates a problem. So
Speaker 1: I think both sides of it are true. I think
Speaker 1: you want to protect domestic innovation without just turning things stagnant,
Speaker 1: which is a tough f Lind walk, But.
Speaker 2: I think the important one, yeah, which gets to a
Speaker 2: bigger question. I want to ask you which willet to,
Speaker 2: which is sort of where do we go from here?
Speaker 2: But as I think through this, I think about some
Speaker 2: of these things, and I constantly kind of keep going
Speaker 2: back to sort of like the government just getting too big,
Speaker 2: and so a lot of these functions seem to be
Speaker 2: or some of these maybe unintended consequences seem to be
Speaker 2: a consequence of just government just being too big. But
Speaker 2: then to the point that you're talking about of like,
Speaker 2: how do we think about policies that can protect the
Speaker 2: company these companies in these industries, and then that just
Speaker 2: again keeps the government sort of getting getting big. I
Speaker 2: want I want to come back to that though, because
Speaker 2: you write a lot about Rhodesia. As you said, that
Speaker 2: was sort of your spark that got you going to
Speaker 2: where you're at today.
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Speaker 2: What do you see in in Rhodesia maybe sort of
Speaker 2: being like a microcosm of maybe where we're at today,
Speaker 2: and maybe what are some of the lessons that does.
Speaker 2: Is it just lessons that sort of show where we're going,
Speaker 2: like on a downward trajectory, or is there maybe some
Speaker 2: lessons of how we can turn things around?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's actually a great lesson in how
Speaker 1: things can function. And it's the opposite of Rubisia is Singapore.
Speaker 1: So as I talked about Rudizia earlier, the thing to
Speaker 1: keep in mind is that Leekwan need the opposite of
Speaker 1: all this, And now Singapore is one of the most
Speaker 1: thriving places in the world.
Speaker 2: So would you also to throw like Dubai into that.
Speaker 1: I think it's somewhat different in that its wealth was
Speaker 1: pumped out of the ground.
Speaker 2: I think Dubai less than one percent of GDP comes
Speaker 2: from oil, really less than one percent of GDP. I
Speaker 2: was recently over there. I spoke at the Bigcoin conference
Speaker 2: there in December, the first time I went there, and
Speaker 2: I posted something on Twitter that got me crucified. I
Speaker 2: didn't know you couldn't say nice things about Dubai and
Speaker 2: being in La, it's a complete war zone. And I
Speaker 2: just said, hey, it's just interesting because I had all
Speaker 2: these preconceived notions of Dubai. I had never been there,
Speaker 2: and so I had these preconceived notions, and when I
Speaker 2: got there, I have to say, it's the most magnificent
Speaker 2: city I've ever seen. I've never seen anything like it.
Speaker 2: It's the whole thing's brand new, twenty years old, the
Speaker 2: most technological advance, the biggest fountain, the tallest building, all
Speaker 2: these things. But I just made a post and I said,
Speaker 2: it's interesting coming from La, which has the highest taxes
Speaker 2: in the nation, worst infrastructure of the nation, and not
Speaker 2: a single crane in the sky. You can tell a
Speaker 2: lot about a city by the development in Dubai has
Speaker 2: no taxes, the cleanest and best infrastructure I've ever seen
Speaker 2: in my life, and cranes everywhere. And then of course
Speaker 2: I got a million comments cruise, fine, Oh you should
Speaker 2: go live there. You want to live under a dictator.
Speaker 2: You must want gay people to die, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: because everyone's their slaves, and yeah, because they stole all
Speaker 2: the oil.
Speaker 3: So anyway, I had to.
Speaker 2: Go look it up. Yeah, less than one percent comes
Speaker 2: from oil. They have no income taxes. They have corporate
Speaker 2: taxes of nine percent over if you make over a
Speaker 2: certain amount. But they sort of did a say Singapore day.
Speaker 2: It was just outcompete. But anyway, we'll table that. I
Speaker 2: started to take it down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: But that's really interesting. Yeah it was.
Speaker 2: And again it took me going there to like, like
Speaker 2: I said, challenge all the things. Like one thing I
Speaker 2: look at like a major problem that the Europe Europe
Speaker 2: has as well as America is like this immigration problem.
Speaker 2: But ninety percent of people in the UAE are all emigrants.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it's a different system.
Speaker 2: There's a lot there.
Speaker 3: There's a different system.
Speaker 2: Of course. Let's get back to uh kind of the
Speaker 2: Rhodesia and the Singapore example.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you or the Dubai might be a great
Speaker 1: example of kind of sing more strategy then, because what
Speaker 1: I think about Singapore versus Rhodesia Zimbabwe, the big differences
Speaker 1: are pragmatic policies that are going to embrace human flourishing
Speaker 1: for the citizens of the country embraced or they just
Speaker 1: hated if they don't line up with ideology. At leak
Speaker 1: one you was non ideological. He just wanted Singapore to succeed.
Speaker 1: And so you see the strange mix of like McKinley's
Speaker 1: style policies with non first world leadership and some priors
Speaker 1: that are very interesting where he's going to these conferences
Speaker 1: in Africa post colonal Africa, but then you know, really
Speaker 1: doing first world stuff at home. As his autobiography title
Speaker 1: third World the first kind of sum set up. So
Speaker 1: it's very pragmatic, works with the Chinese, works with the America,
Speaker 1: and it's this mix of stuff that whatever he needs
Speaker 1: to do. And so Singpour is a huge success story
Speaker 1: because of that. He embraced this pragmatism. Rhodesia, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, under the Ian Smith government very much did
Speaker 1: that and worked with everyone to the Drew Creet could,
Speaker 1: But then Mugabe did not. He famously just destroyed the
Speaker 1: country by seizing the white farms and has that in Zimbabwe.
Speaker 3: Yes, so Zimbabwe.
Speaker 1: So Rhodesia became called Zimbabwe when Mudagia was elected in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty in a very corrupt election.
Speaker 2: So so Rhodesia was a colony of the.
Speaker 3: UK kind of. It's an interesting story.
Speaker 1: So Jamestown is you probably know, was a company colony
Speaker 1: that subscriptions were raised with the Virginia Company to make Jamestown.
Speaker 3: Rodzia was somewhat similar.
Speaker 1: Cecil Rhodes was this big promoter of the British Empire
Speaker 1: and he both wanted a railroad from the Cape to Cairo,
Speaker 1: so from South Africa to Egypt, and needed the middle
Speaker 1: of Africa to do that, and also just thought it
Speaker 1: was a good thing for the English Empire to expand
Speaker 1: because of the benefits for everyone involved, both for raising
Speaker 1: up the natives and for providing more resources and export
Speaker 1: markets for the home market. So he saw that there
Speaker 1: was this vast tract of territory north of South Africa
Speaker 1: that was almost unpopulated. There had been some large wars
Speaker 1: amongst the Africans that meant the population was very low,
Speaker 1: and the population that was there was largely welcoming to
Speaker 1: British settlement. Is the forget the name of the chief,
Speaker 1: but it was the Neballet tribe was in charge at
Speaker 1: the time, and there welcomed the British more or less
Speaker 1: so roads put together this company called the British South
Speaker 1: Africa company that using largely funding from England, and then
Speaker 1: men gathered in England and South Africa, and he was
Speaker 1: looking for men of higher.
Speaker 3: Quality than you might expect. There were many pirate types.
Speaker 1: It sent them into Rhodesia to settle the land, and
Speaker 1: he was really hoping was to settle it so that
Speaker 1: it was a stable conne where he could put a
Speaker 1: railroad through it, and that they'd find gold because at
Speaker 1: the time the rand mind in South Africa were just
Speaker 1: producing this huge flood of gold that helped the world
Speaker 1: economy coud bit and made the owner's fabulously wealthy. So
Speaker 1: rhodes wanted that tappen again in Rhodesia. He struck out
Speaker 1: on the goal. There wasn't much there, but they did
Speaker 1: find the lands are fertile and it was very great
Speaker 1: for growing tobacco. So Rhodesia became this company owned essentially agricultural,
Speaker 1: unto a lesser remining settlement where these large estates were
Speaker 1: built up, because there's no history of agriculture there at
Speaker 1: least any real degree. So unlike Britain, where farms were
Speaker 1: constrained by say the three hundred acres in the all
Speaker 1: defenses of stone surrounding it and made really doing anything
Speaker 1: on a mechanical scale difficult. In Rhodesia, there's no one there,
Speaker 1: so you could just use a tractor and go from
Speaker 1: horizon to horizon, back and forth, and you could really
Speaker 1: take advantage of the efficiency.
Speaker 3: So it became this.
Speaker 1: Hugely successful agricultural colony where their main export was tobacco
Speaker 1: and to a lesser free wheat and cattle. So under
Speaker 1: British South Africa Company it thrived until nineteen twenty one
Speaker 1: when it became self governing and the company was no
Speaker 1: longer in charge.
Speaker 2: Okay, and then it continued on self governing and Til
Speaker 2: Moubobby came and turned it back into Zimbabwe in the eighties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it remained part of the Commonwealth until nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five. What happened then was so from nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: to nineteen sixty five it continued attracting settlement brought in.
Speaker 1: It had very strict immigration quality or controls, because they
Speaker 1: only wanted people who would integrate to the local environment
Speaker 1: to move there, so very strict and not a ton
Speaker 1: of people fled in, but enough to build it up
Speaker 1: as an economy.
Speaker 3: The problem was.
Speaker 1: That Britain after the mid fifties was very hostile to
Speaker 1: its empire.
Speaker 3: It wanted to shed it.
Speaker 1: It wanted mass democracy to rule in place of kind
Speaker 1: of European directed and led government. So first Kenya fell
Speaker 1: apart and a lot of the Empire started to decay.
Speaker 1: But then the Belgians who owned the Congo gave it
Speaker 1: up to the Congolese. And what followed was a like
Speaker 1: a parade of horrors that are absolutely awful, particularly the
Speaker 1: Simba Rebellion, which was in like sixty two, sixty three,
Speaker 1: maybe sixty four, I can't quite remember, but in the
Speaker 1: early sixties it was just like all the Belgian nuns
Speaker 1: in the Congo were killed by these rebels, along with
Speaker 1: a lot of Conguise villagers.
Speaker 3: There are just these.
Speaker 1: Huge humanitarian catastrophes. And so the Rhodesians looked at the
Speaker 1: Congo and said, well, we don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: We don't want to turn into this just anarcic hellhole.
Speaker 1: We want a stable, responsible government. They call it responsible government.
Speaker 1: And the British said, well, no, you need mass democracy
Speaker 1: if you're going to remain part of the empire or
Speaker 1: detach yourself from that. We want mass democracy, we want
Speaker 1: local rule, not white rule in Rhodesia, which was a
Speaker 1: problem because the African chiefs who inside Rdisia directed much
Speaker 1: of the black political power and general functioning administration. Agreed
Speaker 1: with Ian Smith, who was the Prime Minister of Rhodesia
Speaker 1: at the time, that really you need this responsible government
Speaker 1: system the Rhodesians had built up, which was a property
Speaker 1: voting one. As I hinted at earlier, it wasn't a
Speaker 1: part idly in South Africa. There weren't these strict racial rules.
Speaker 1: There weren't really any racial rules except for schooling.
Speaker 3: And for politics. For voting, it was simply that to
Speaker 3: vote in the national.
Speaker 1: List, the A list, you needed to have the modern
Speaker 1: equivalent of about sixty thousand U s dollars of Rhodesian property.
Speaker 1: So whether I was a farm where there's a house
Speaker 1: doc and a rodishan company, whatever, you just needed that
Speaker 1: to be able to vote in national election.
Speaker 3: They found that screened out.
Speaker 1: The people who couldn't make good decisions, and we're pretty
Speaker 1: successful in doing it. And that's a system that they
Speaker 1: had as they rose to prominence and success. The British
Speaker 1: said that system was racist, demand to get rid of it,
Speaker 1: and so that sparked the Unilateral Decoration Independence in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, where Rhodesia, using language drawn from the American
Speaker 1: Decoration Independence, broke away from the British Commonwealth and became
Speaker 1: a fully independent country. But except for Portugal, South Africa
Speaker 1: and Israel, the rest of the world didn't didn't legitimize that,
Speaker 1: didn't recognize it as a country. So it led to
Speaker 1: this Bush War from nineteen sixty five to nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: or communist rebels that were backed by the Chinese and
Speaker 1: the Russians and also the Americans. The British attacked Rhodesia
Speaker 1: and tried to end it and bring in Mugabe, who
Speaker 1: was a dictator, and it eventually ended in his victory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean then that's just continued across Africa,
Speaker 2: the decolonization, if you will. I've looked into pretty extensively,
Speaker 2: like what happened in South Africa, and I saw someone
Speaker 2: post just yesterday. I mean that seems like the whole
Speaker 2: African continent is sort of under some sort of war
Speaker 2: at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a.
Speaker 1: Spat and I think the Congo right now between the
Speaker 1: South African military and I think Bulgarian military on one
Speaker 1: hand and the Rwandans on the other, and the Rwandans
Speaker 1: just one.
Speaker 3: But it's terrible.
Speaker 1: And if you look at what happened there, and the
Speaker 1: Congo is another good example, there were ways to end
Speaker 1: the chaos. Very early on in my core he might
Speaker 1: have heard of was a South African mercenary who at
Speaker 1: the request of the Congolese government ended the sembl rebellion
Speaker 1: and wanted to after the rebellion bring continued stability to
Speaker 1: the country. But the UN forced them out because it
Speaker 1: was a majority white militia or mercenary outfit, and they said, well,
Speaker 1: that's racist and you have to leave. And so then
Speaker 1: the Congo got five decades of civil war with millions
Speaker 1: de millions of people dead because of that. And so
Speaker 1: it's very much the opposite of Singapore or instead of
Speaker 1: these pragmatic policies, you get this race communism essentially.
Speaker 2: When I look at the Singapore example of the Dubai example,
Speaker 2: I mean again Singapore in Dubai seems to have set
Speaker 2: up a system that just sort of outcompeted in Dubai,
Speaker 2: I mean, their immigration is very strict, right, unless you're
Speaker 2: gonna be a productive member of society. You're not invited.
Speaker 2: It's an invite on these society. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: they don't have all that industrialization to protect, right, they
Speaker 2: don't have steel companies to protect, so like Well, on
Speaker 2: one hand, that type of government seems to make sense,
Speaker 2: and it certainly has worked on a small scale, as
Speaker 2: we can point to at Singapore, maybe Hong Kong to
Speaker 2: some extent Dubai, et cetera. That doesn't necessarily apply apples
Speaker 2: to apples over to the US, right, because the US
Speaker 2: needs to be almost more protectionist of their industries that
Speaker 2: they have. I think that's what you're sort of alluding
Speaker 2: to earlier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the policies you get from that sort
Speaker 1: of government are different and tailored to local circumstances.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: One of leakwon U's famous innovations was he put air
Speaker 1: conditioning in every government office so that the bureaucrats would
Speaker 1: work in the afternoon instead of taking siestas, and it
Speaker 1: hugely boosted Singapore's governing capacity without having to bring on
Speaker 1: more people. You don't really need that in New York
Speaker 1: for London, and it's not the same thing. But I
Speaker 1: do think if you look at, say, what's the similarity
Speaker 1: between Leekwon Yu and the President Kinley. It's this non
Speaker 1: ideological view of events and economics where they're going to
Speaker 1: take whatever step is necessary to protect the wealth of
Speaker 1: the nation and the stability of the nation, but do
Speaker 1: so because it will work condision's history of it working,
Speaker 1: not because some ideologic, ideological belief told them they had
Speaker 1: to do it.
Speaker 3: It's I think that's the similarity.
Speaker 2: When you talk about the colonies, as we just kind
Speaker 2: of talked about, it seems like everything in life that
Speaker 2: there's just trade offs. You know, Alex Gladstein, I'm sure
Speaker 2: you've come across his work plenty and he is, you know,
Speaker 2: one hundred percent and thinking that the colonies are the
Speaker 2: worst thing in the world. And from his viewpoint and
Speaker 2: the things that he talks about, the way that the
Speaker 2: French use the CFA to you know, debase the currency.
Speaker 2: I get it that those two like really bad things.
Speaker 2: I can also see how there's also good things that happened, right,
Speaker 2: So they did bring civilization technology order to things that
Speaker 2: didn't have that before. So I think there's trade offs.
Speaker 3: Maybe would you agree with that absolutely?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there's good things about colonization, but there's also
Speaker 2: bad things. It can be misused and abused, just like
Speaker 2: any other policy probably for that matter. So you know,
Speaker 2: to the point of removing the colonization is like entropy,
Speaker 2: and now it's just into chaos and evolving into you know,
Speaker 2: mass disorder, which is not good. So I guess what
Speaker 2: I'd like to maybe just pivot into and sort of
Speaker 2: to wrap this up is, you know, now you're well
Speaker 2: versed in history. You've seen the differences of what happened
Speaker 2: with the French Revolution versus the American Revolution, all the
Speaker 2: way back to Roman Empire and even Socrates the way
Speaker 2: they think about this and the colonization. You know, you've
Speaker 2: mentioned a couple of times, you know, sort of how
Speaker 2: democracy fails and the reasons for that. Obviously, America was
Speaker 2: founded as a republic, not a democracy. I'm curious what
Speaker 2: you think to be sort of this way forward, maybe
Speaker 2: first just for the United States, and then maybe how
Speaker 2: that fits into the world and then maybe I'm sure,
Speaker 2: since you're so well read, you're probably also from with
Speaker 2: the sovereign individual thesis and which way forward and do
Speaker 2: you think maybe it goes in that direction?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a lot there.
Speaker 2: Okay, just break it down yeah.
Speaker 1: So the first thing in America, you have to stop
Speaker 1: the entropy, and I think that's often like the biggest
Speaker 1: hurdle because it has this vibe, for lack of a better.
Speaker 3: Word, of paternalism.
Speaker 1: You have to stop people from doing X or stop
Speaker 1: people from ten y. So if you don't want you know,
Speaker 1: some woman lit on fire in the subway, as happened
Speaker 1: in New York recently, you don't want these like random
Speaker 1: attacks in the street. You don't want crime that calls
Speaker 1: for a stronger stance against things. You don't necessarily need
Speaker 1: a bigger government. You don't necessarily need cameras on every
Speaker 1: street corner that didn't have them in eighteen ninety, but
Speaker 1: you do need to have a just we're not going
Speaker 1: to deal with this approach to things.
Speaker 2: Which I think is actual punishment. Yes, yeah, actual punishment.
Speaker 2: Whether it's not like here in California, where you can
Speaker 2: steal up to one thousand dollars without a being crime.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in Singapore, they'll cane you where they tie you
Speaker 1: the ladder and hit you with a stick, and that
Speaker 1: works pretty well in terms of stopping this petty crime,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. Based on the country, you just have
Speaker 1: to find something where people aren't going to commit these crimes.
Speaker 3: The entropy's going to stop, and you know that.
Speaker 1: I think we know how to do, we just don't
Speaker 1: want to. But it's this tough one crime approach, whether
Speaker 1: you're putting in people in jail like Bukla or hitting
Speaker 1: them with rods like in Singapore something. The step after
Speaker 1: that is, I think you need to get rid of
Speaker 1: the short termism. At these short time horizons have just
Speaker 1: proven devastating to society, particularly industrial ones, where you have
Speaker 1: to take these long term steps to preserve and build
Speaker 1: the wealth of the nation. So how do you do that.
Speaker 1: That's really a situation that situation thing. I think for companies,
Speaker 1: for example, because we talked about that earlier, you'd want
Speaker 1: to use probably the SEC guidance to encourage companies to
Speaker 1: think about the health of the company both during and
Speaker 1: after the CEO's tenure for pay and pushing it out
Speaker 1: rather than just the short termism. But you know, that's
Speaker 1: kind of up to companies and stuff. I think the
Speaker 1: bigger thing politically is finding ways to put limits on
Speaker 1: mass democracy that work with our culture. Ever since Jackson,
Speaker 1: we've been somewhat of a universal suffrage nation. That's worked
Speaker 1: okay in some regards, so it definitely probably works okay
Speaker 1: for the House of Representatives. I do think the Senate
Speaker 1: is supposed to be different, So either removing the amendment
Speaker 1: about the Senate being a popular vote rather than state vote,
Speaker 1: or finding some way to do a new update a
Speaker 1: new amendment about that I think would be helpful. I
Speaker 1: think also you'd probably want to look at something about
Speaker 1: a new amendment for voting where only net taxpayers could vote.
Speaker 1: I mean, preferably we're not going to have the income tax,
Speaker 1: but if we are, you don't want the people who
Speaker 1: can loot the treasury doing so. You want to have
Speaker 1: the people who are contributing something on net to both
Speaker 1: the governments.
Speaker 2: Again as a game, yeah, skin in the game exactly.
Speaker 2: I've also thought that's like the easiest requirement. If you
Speaker 2: don't pay tax, you just shouldn't vote. Like just back
Speaker 2: to my homeowner example, if I don't live in the
Speaker 2: neighborhood anymore, if I don't own the home in the neighborhood,
Speaker 2: I probably shouldn't vote either.
Speaker 1: Right, And you could kind of go down the rabbit
Speaker 1: hole of specificity with that, But I think broadly the
Speaker 1: mindset should be. How are we going to limit democracy
Speaker 1: somewhat so that we can bring about long term thinking
Speaker 1: With whatever you work, I think the net taxpayer thing
Speaker 1: is probably the lowest hanging for you, just because you know,
Speaker 1: everyone who's a productive citizen degreews with that more or less.
Speaker 3: Some don't, but most do. So there's that.
Speaker 1: Hey, I've talked about those people before, and this is
Speaker 1: the much tougher question. But inculcating virtue in people, both
Speaker 1: just those who kind of exist and definitely those who lead,
Speaker 1: is an important thing either. The Founding fathers after the Bible,
Speaker 1: the most common ancient work on their.
Speaker 3: Shelf was Plutarch's Lives.
Speaker 1: And Plutarch was a writer and early Empire Rome who
Speaker 1: discussed the lie. He called it the Lives of the
Speaker 1: Noble Romans and Grecians, and it was the great men
Speaker 1: of Greece and the great men of Rome, and discussing
Speaker 1: their character traits, both moral failings and moral virtues, and
Speaker 1: of course their stands some reality of someone different in
Speaker 1: Rome than ours. But he discussed them, and if you
Speaker 1: still go back and read them, very useful. And that's
Speaker 1: a small example. But no school teaches Plutarch now, even
Speaker 1: though our founding fathers when they wrote our constitution and
Speaker 1: built our government, they're doing it with Plutarch in mind.
Speaker 2: And that is because you can't legislate morality right right.
Speaker 3: But you can't teach it.
Speaker 1: I think so, I you know, our education system is
Speaker 1: flawed in many ways. I do think you voluntarily want
Speaker 1: to teach people to have the right morals. And everyone
Speaker 1: has a different opinion on the right morals. But I think,
Speaker 1: you know, generally this idea of stewardship and the duty
Speaker 1: and sacrifice are good things for people to think of, because.
Speaker 2: Do you think do you think that's also like that
Speaker 2: that at that point I heard Jordan Peterson talk about that,
Speaker 2: So like build a country is built on Judeo Christian principles,
Speaker 2: have that self sacrifice built in, which is why somebody
Speaker 2: may get out at five and five am or three
Speaker 2: am in a in a in a hurricane to go
Speaker 2: fix a power line, where in another country maybe they
Speaker 2: wouldn't do that. But also, like you know, early in
Speaker 2: America too, people went to church and people gave it
Speaker 2: the church, and the church took care of the needy.
Speaker 2: And today without that, it seems like a lot of
Speaker 2: people expect the state to take care of the need.
Speaker 1: Right well, and you know that's another opportunity for a
Speaker 1: form that I think would be helpful. So you have
Speaker 1: the virtue angle, but then you just have the practicality
Speaker 1: of it. As talking with someone yesterday about you know,
Speaker 1: Trump is trying to slash if it's Wick or one
Speaker 1: of the other foodstamp programs.
Speaker 3: But he says, it's just abused. We need to get
Speaker 3: rid of it.
Speaker 1: There're different opinions on that, but I think it's very
Speaker 1: true that it's abused. People have known about this for ages.
Speaker 1: The ways you're able to get around it and use
Speaker 1: it to put money in your pocket. So you know,
Speaker 1: what separates that from a food bank is that the
Speaker 1: food bank is generally run by a church or some
Speaker 1: other organization that cares about the community. It's all local,
Speaker 1: where it's local people drawing from it and contributing to it.
Speaker 1: So there's these ties that bind you know, people in
Speaker 1: the community, and so it's limited. They're not just going
Speaker 1: to keep giving you pasta to sell to buy cigarettes with.
Speaker 1: They're going to, you know, expect you to feature family
Speaker 1: with it. And what that does is it gets rid
Speaker 1: of this concept of just philanthropy is this broad exercise
Speaker 1: where once you contribute the money, you don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about it, whether it's tax dollars or whether it's
Speaker 1: giving a billion dollars to some African country for mosquito nets.
Speaker 1: They're just skins for fishing and over fish. Instead, it's
Speaker 1: more no less oblieged. It's this older system that you
Speaker 1: have a duty to those around you. You should be
Speaker 1: attached to the people in your community into what you
Speaker 1: can for them, and so you know, whether it's church
Speaker 1: or whether it's something secular and just built around making
Speaker 1: at work. As a Christian, I'd say the church is
Speaker 1: more useful for this.
Speaker 2: But the problem is the secular people don't. Most secular
Speaker 2: people don't have that self sacrifice, right right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, there's a host of problems.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think drawing things.
Speaker 1: In locally, kind of what we were talking about earlier
Speaker 1: with what changes you need to make, I do think
Speaker 1: localism will be helpful because every community's needs are different
Speaker 1: and also the opportunities there are different. So taking things
Speaker 1: away from the federal government's ability to dictate them and
Speaker 1: putting in them, putting them in the hands of local
Speaker 1: people of prominence I think would be hugely helpful, both
Speaker 1: on the charity and self sacrifice angle. But then also
Speaker 1: I'm making America prosperous again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So I want to ask you the question
Speaker 2: of which way forward. But based off of all of that,
Speaker 2: it sounds like you still have a lot of help
Speaker 2: for the future.
Speaker 3: I do. I think a lot of people blackfill.
Speaker 1: They just have this sense of doom, which you're even
Speaker 1: somewhere like Spain or France that might be closer to reality.
Speaker 3: I think of a debt everything, they're gonna have a
Speaker 3: lot of trouble.
Speaker 1: But I think in America we still just because our
Speaker 1: society became so prosperous and effective and really good at things,
Speaker 1: we have this vast store of capital that we're able
Speaker 1: to draw down and build on. And we've been in
Speaker 1: the draw down stage for a while. That's why things
Speaker 1: are getting worse. That's why, as you mentioned, the roads
Speaker 1: are just awful everywhere, and you can't go to the
Speaker 1: mall because you'll get shot. But it can also be
Speaker 1: built upon. We have all these things where you know,
Speaker 1: we had an effective society, We have all the remnants
Speaker 1: of it. We just need to rebuild it in a
Speaker 1: different way that works better than the last one did.
Speaker 1: But I think in America we should certainly have hope
Speaker 1: that a lot of these things can be improved and fixed,
Speaker 1: and once we fix them and kind of move forward,
Speaker 1: I think there's a good reason for hope.
Speaker 2: So then moving forward, we'll finish it up with this
Speaker 2: like I throughout the sovereign individual thesis.
Speaker 3: And so for those that don't know, I mean, it's.
Speaker 2: A book written and you should certainly read that book.
Speaker 2: I like it sort of my worldview, but it sort
Speaker 2: of paints this picture back to kind of going into
Speaker 2: this information age of us being able to sort of
Speaker 2: move more globally, if you will, because we're in cyberspace,
Speaker 2: not being tied down as much to one local area,
Speaker 2: like we kind of talked about like the old lords
Speaker 2: of the past that had their land in the local area.
Speaker 3: But it also talked.
Speaker 2: About a structure of small sort of entrepreneurial driven skin
Speaker 2: in the game localities or small governments, if you will,
Speaker 2: maybe not unlike what the United States was meant to
Speaker 2: be at some point in its founding. What do you
Speaker 2: think the way forward is?
Speaker 1: I think one kind of issue with framing of just
Speaker 1: that esis generally is we've tried the atomized individual thing,
Speaker 1: and it works out very poorly for a lot of people.
Speaker 3: There are some people who thrive in.
Speaker 1: That circumstance, but you also get a lot of depths
Speaker 1: of despair and people like having a community to which
Speaker 1: they're attached. And now that doesn't mean you need a
Speaker 1: big government, that doesn't mean you need all the trappings
Speaker 1: we have now.
Speaker 3: But I do think that at least for most.
Speaker 1: People, some degree of community is a useful exercise and
Speaker 1: something that they want. So then I think the question becomes,
Speaker 1: how do you build community in a way that you're
Speaker 1: both self sovereign and the community is sovereign. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if you're familiar with it, but Blagie, I
Speaker 1: won't try pronouncing his last names.
Speaker 3: Trinavastin wrote that book.
Speaker 2: That never state.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I do think the concept of city states
Speaker 1: of the future Singapore and Dubai. Of course your city
Speaker 1: states is a very useful one because those are bigger
Speaker 1: city states. But the community that can be built and
Speaker 1: the sovereignty that can be built by building a new
Speaker 1: prosperous place, I think is something that we're going to
Speaker 1: see more of. Prospera is trying to figure it out
Speaker 1: off the coast of Honduras, I think, and there's c
Speaker 1: stetting some other things. I think that free cities type
Speaker 1: thing is something that really helped Europe get its way
Speaker 1: out of the Middle Ages and is something that would
Speaker 1: help us now with kind of our present dark age.
Speaker 1: So I don't think it's individual atomization, but I do
Speaker 1: think the breaking up of some of these old calcified
Speaker 1: states and forms is going to be both going to
Speaker 1: happen and going to be useful as it happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, not the individual to the person thesis,
Speaker 2: but just like as I said, sort of like you know,
Speaker 2: the US is fifty independent states as opposed to everything
Speaker 2: being federal, right where like now three hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: million people live under one regime where it's supposed to
Speaker 2: be sort of like one state. And then even to
Speaker 2: the point where the states have gotten way bigger and
Speaker 2: probably should have been cut up at some point even
Speaker 2: as well, right so, and then maybe going back to
Speaker 2: like a county structure, ye, just if you will.
Speaker 1: Right, well, yeah, and that's the one thing people forget.
Speaker 1: It's clear though if you read works of the time,
Speaker 1: that the county was the unit people depended on. Gone
Speaker 1: with the Wind is that famous book about Civil war Georgia,
Speaker 1: But in it they rarely talk about the state. They
Speaker 1: never talk about either of the national governments. It's the county.
Speaker 1: You know, what are people in the county doing to mobilize?
Speaker 1: What's county leadership looking like? Who are the men of
Speaker 1: note in the county? And that condense things locally where
Speaker 1: it's a useful thing to care about because you know
Speaker 1: about the problem children. You know, you know about the
Speaker 1: people have not It's more useful and more manageable as
Speaker 1: a human And you know, the information age has expanded
Speaker 1: the ability to be useful somewhat, but I still think
Speaker 1: there are only so many things you can keep track
Speaker 1: of even with computers.
Speaker 2: Do you think that bitcoin can sort of help to
Speaker 2: shape I would say, but maybe even force that a
Speaker 2: little bit, right where like if if it does, you
Speaker 2: know what, what I think is sort of maybe separating
Speaker 2: money in state and which would then sort of limit
Speaker 2: the states never ending ability to grow. Then it sort
Speaker 2: of sets constraints on what they're able to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's hopeful.
Speaker 1: I think the problem with relying on it completely is
Speaker 1: that Prussia existed during the gold standard era, as did
Speaker 1: the Czars Russia, and I know those are different than that.
Speaker 1: There are the gold standards different from bitcoin, but tyranny
Speaker 1: can still exist in a hard money world.
Speaker 3: I think, what's the.
Speaker 1: Most useful or most hopeful thing about bitcoin, as you
Speaker 1: as you're talking about with your neighbor, but the ability
Speaker 1: to move, vote with your feet and say I'm done
Speaker 1: with this, I'm not putting up with anymore, because it's
Speaker 1: the perfect bearer hasset where you can just leave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the thing was like Pressia and just I
Speaker 2: mean just wars and tyranny with the gold standard is
Speaker 2: like to the point that you made earlier about the
Speaker 2: lords of old, like I could just get up and
Speaker 2: leave with all my wealth, so then I was certainly
Speaker 2: under that thumb of tyranny as well as if you
Speaker 2: came and took me over, you also took all my wealth,
Speaker 2: so that made the return, as the sovereignividuals say, right,
Speaker 2: the return on violence is very high. Right, But if
Speaker 2: you can't come and take me over and take my wealth,
Speaker 2: or if I could just leave and take my wealth
Speaker 2: with me, then it makes the return on vines very low.
Speaker 3: Right. I think there's something there. I think you're right.
Speaker 1: I think you know the barons, for example, if you
Speaker 1: read about the Plantagenet kings in England, so kind of
Speaker 1: up to the fourteen hundreds, all these barrens wars where
Speaker 1: the king would try and take something and they'd say, well,
Speaker 1: we're not doing this, We're going to fight. I think
Speaker 1: kind of how gold and silver enabled that at the time,
Speaker 1: because if you pay mercenaries with gold or silver and
Speaker 1: you know them or as people that rely on you,
Speaker 1: there's not really anything an outside force can do about that.
Speaker 1: They can try and stop you, but that's different from saying,
Speaker 1: as happens with credit cards or cash, now you can't
Speaker 1: do that. We're going to stop you before you get
Speaker 1: I think bitcoin is kind of helpful like you're talking about,
Speaker 1: and that even if someone comes for you, they can't
Speaker 1: mess with you in the same way they can with cash.
Speaker 1: So I think it's very useful and I think it's
Speaker 1: hopeful for liberty moving forward. I think the ways we'll
Speaker 1: see a play out are probably gonna be unexpected, at
Speaker 1: least from what I'm thinking about.
Speaker 3: But I think these city states are.
Speaker 1: Going to be powered by bitcoin, powered by just similar
Speaker 1: type of things that take, as you said, money out
Speaker 1: of the state's hands.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: All right, Well we covered a lot of ground that's
Speaker 2: super fascinating. I love history, not near as much as
Speaker 2: you do, but hopefully everybody thought this was as interesting
Speaker 2: as I did. I'm certainly going to link to a
Speaker 2: bunch of your writing down below in the show notes
Speaker 2: down below, so people can get caught up and read
Speaker 2: your stuff, anything that you want to point their attention
Speaker 2: to specifically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you go to either my Twitter or my substack,
Speaker 1: which will probably be linked up, just the top articles
Speaker 1: that are on there where I've written about this stuff
Speaker 1: the most. So if anything interested you, it's probably on
Speaker 1: there too. You can just find more about it contact
Speaker 1: me through Twitter, all right, thanks so much. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me on