Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 702: Matt Kibbe on CrossFit, Cryptocurrency, Freedom & MORE

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. What is this? It seems like the most libertarians that we keep meaning are buff. Is there a correlation between political views and muscle? Actually, you know, it's funny. They did do some studies on that.

Starting point is 00:00:27 I don't know how accurate they are, but here's what I do think. So Matt, Matt Kibbie, I've seen him many times on interviews and stuff talking about libertarian ideas or although, aka classical liberal ideas, free markets, free choice, do what you want, just as long as you don't hurt anybody, free choice, you know, do what you want, just as long as you don't hurt anybody, don't steal from anybody, that kind of stuff. I've been hearing them, you know, talk about these things for a while, and I've also been in fitness for a while, and I noticed that people in the fitness community are greater percentage

Starting point is 00:00:56 of them versus the regular popularist tends to subscribe to a lot of these ideas, and I was talking to Matt off-air, you know, what he to Matt off air, what he sees in that, because as the audience will hear in this episode, Matt is good friends of great glassmen from CrossFit. And that's not because they do CrossFit together, it's because of this other stuff that we're talking about. And he said, he noticed the same thing. And I said, do you think it's because people

Starting point is 00:01:21 who are into working out and the nutrition, they take that philosophy of personal responsibility, like, I'm gonna take care of myself, I don't want anybody also take care of it. I was just like, yeah, that's what it makes, too. That's what it makes sense. I was trying to figure out what was it about him

Starting point is 00:01:35 that I really liked? And I think what I put together, and as I'm sitting there listening to him, he's kinda got this like, very even kill monotone voice that you guys are gonna hear in this episode. He's very chill. Right, but I think what that is is is i think he does that intentionally and is trained himself to do that in a very emotionally charged

Starting point is 00:01:52 field you know i'm saying like i think most people he deals with like you see him on hardball you seem on bill mar you seem on some of these these channels that the guys that are the host are just ruffland very very flamboyant, right? Or just loud and inflammatory. It's on the delivery, right? Like, so I remember him kind of like talking about that

Starting point is 00:02:11 on some level, it's just like, if he were to be like super emotional, like have some kind of like energy behind when he's delivering like whatever stance he was taking, like it's gonna go like somebody's gonna tune out, like real fast, like it's gonna go, like somebody's gonna tune out, like real fast, or somebody's gonna like, yeah, yeah, like subscribe to that, like, and it's gonna be very polarizing.

Starting point is 00:02:31 So to kind of, you know, keep it a moderate kind of energy behind it, I think is a smart strategy. Yeah, so this episode is not really a fitness episode. Although we did, we got into CrossFit right out of the gate. We did, we talked about these friends with Glassman, right? And he talked about how Glassman is trying to fight against this push to regulate, you know, for training sort of things. And big sugar is influence on government, you know, recommendations for health and nutrition

Starting point is 00:02:59 like the food pyramid and that kind of stuff. But we talked about all kinds of different things. We talked about some controversial topics like the gender pyramid and that kind of stuff. But we talked about all kinds of different things. We talked about some controversial topics like the gender pay gap. We talked about Liberty as a philosophy. We talked about free markets. Got an Ecrypto currency. We talked about cryptocurrency.

Starting point is 00:03:14 So it's a little bit of a, you know, not necessarily a fitness based podcast that we just recorded, but a very interesting one. And this is a gentleman that I've been reading his articles and stuff for a little while. I'm very happy to have him on the show. I think you'll enjoy some of it if you're not. If you're here just for health and fitness, obviously this is not an episode for you. We do not dive deep into health and fitness whatsoever in this podcast.

Starting point is 00:03:41 We've had so many people that love the conversations that we have outside of just fitness. And I think that was what drove us in this direction that, hey, you know what, we've had such great feedback when we kind of go off topic of fitness and we have these conversations where we have healthy debates about these topics. So, you know, we wanted to reach out to some of the professionals in these areas and have a show. It's just a nice change. I mean, we're our shows about like seeking truth in all things. And so I think that, you know,

Starting point is 00:04:11 this is kind of just one small step to try and understand, you know, the political climate and where we are today. So. Absolutely. So without any further ado, you can hear us talking to Matt Kibby. You can find him on Facebook.

Starting point is 00:04:25 He has a nonprofit organization called Free the People. So I suggest you go take a look at that. They've got some great videos and information. And really it's just. Spell Matt Kibby too. It's MAT-M-A-T-T. Last name Kibby K-I-B-B-E. So that's it.

Starting point is 00:04:42 Here we are talking to Matt. Enjoy. My wife says I have a great face for radio. That's what all our girls tell us. I don't know. I don't know, man. The constant joke that keeps giving, right? The facial hair is like amazing.

Starting point is 00:04:56 Yeah. You used to be clean shaving back in the day. Yeah, right. Now you've got the whole timing stash. I don't know you were sleeved out, man. I had no idea you had tattoos. Yeah, yeah There's there's a story behind everyone and I'm I'm now trying to figure out what to do with this arm

Starting point is 00:05:09 So you have no idea cuz I'll see you in interviews and stuff and usually you know dress so professional like this guy Yeah, that's awesome. So you were asking us about so your friends with great glassman and the crossfit You know that whole crossfit and you were asking us our opinions on it, you know, from a fitness standpoint, from a market standpoint What they're doing I think is pretty awesome. I know right now if I'm not mistaken He great glassman in Crossfit is trying to fight the this movement to regulate certifications, right personal trainer certifications. So what was this a deal with that? Well, you know, this is a this is a classic fight that anybody that wants to start a business deals with.

Starting point is 00:05:50 I mean, if you braid hair now, we're having a fight about people whether or not they need a thousand hours of training to blow dry hair, this is a real thing. And certification is really an attempt by certain incumbent businesses to stop the crossfit and other trainers that have a different philosophy. The philosophy that says, I don't need a bunch of equipment in my gym. I'm going to teach people based on my experiences and what I do. And Greg's fighting against that because his model and other companies and non- companies that are doing fitness now, they realized that a lot of what we were taught as kids about fitness and about diet and about health is just wrong. So

Starting point is 00:06:38 this is a classic in economics you call it a classic public choice problem where where incumbent businesses collude with local government, state governments. The first place was in DC, where they passed some of these certification laws, of course, because it's crony capitalism, personified. And Greg fights against that, and he argues that the fight is really not just about incumbent gym companies, but what he calls Big Sugar. And the science of Big Sugar and the way that soda companies have infiltrated government

Starting point is 00:07:15 perceptions on diets and what is it called? The food pyramid. Yeah, the food pyramid. Yeah, it's awful. Yeah, it's all bullshit, right? But Greg's been willing to take it on and his business is growing. So yeah, the man's coming after him. How did you first meet him? How did you guys get connected? Through libertarian circles. He spoke years ago in an event that I was at and he's quoting my favorite economist, Fred Rekia, and this guy is an interesting guy,

Starting point is 00:07:46 but he also just hates the corruption that comes from top-down government, so I just love the attitude. So can we, let's give a, because we have a lot of listeners who may not be familiar with the concept or the philosophy of, you know, liberty, and you said libertarian, what does that mean?

Starting point is 00:08:06 What is the philosophy behind that? Yeah, and you know, you don't want to get too caught up in labels because I know people that would call themselves classical liberals, liberal use to mean what we now sort of call libertarian, but libertarians made upward because liberals started to mean something else. I have constitutional conservative friends who believe that too, but me as a libertarian,

Starting point is 00:08:29 I believe that people should be free to pursue their dreams and live their lives. However they want, as long as they don't hurt people or take their stuff, and it's that simple. And from that, we have a general skepticism of government getting involved in too many things. Because government is legal, concentrated monopoly on power and power corrupts people. And I like to see democratized power and I love to see decentralized power. And I'm generally skeptical that that governments can solve all of the problems that they claim

Starting point is 00:09:02 they want to solve for two reasons. One is because power corrupts and you get all these perversions and companies want to game the system and government employees want to game the system, but the other is more fundamental. Knowledge doesn't come from the top down. Knowledge is something that we all have a little bit of and by working through the process of figuring stuff out,

Starting point is 00:09:28 that's where we learn things. And this idea that anybody, a central planner, a president, a congressman, a bureaucrat at the FDA, that they would know everything they needed to know to redesign some aspect of a market, some aspect of your life, that's insane. And it doesn't make any sense, and we all see that every day, that none of us know everything. And sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to get together with your friends and people

Starting point is 00:09:59 that know things different than you and just say, what are we going to do? Let's try something. This might fail, this might not. To me, that's the ethos of libertarianism, and it's not so much anti-government, but it's pro-cooperation. It's really enjoying the beautiful chaos of people figuring stuff out and pursuing happiness and living their lives. And in that sense, I think it's where most, certainly most Americans live. Now, Matt, were you always a libertarian or did this evolve in life? I mean, did you grow born and raise this way?

Starting point is 00:10:38 It's funny. I, when I was 13 years old, I bought an album by a band called Rush. Oh, God. My favorite. And somebody libertarians will tell the story. And it's called 2112, a great album, badass album. And it's dedicated to the genius of Iron Rand. And she, of course, is a novelist, but at 13 years old, I'm like, who's this dude,

Starting point is 00:10:58 Iron Rand? He had no idea. But I eventually stumbled across one of her novels, one called Anthem. And I just consumed one of her novels, one called Anthem, and I just consumed all of her stuff, and she introduced me to other libertarian thinkers. So I was ruined at 13, I had no hope. Yeah, now this is, it's interesting when we talk about this, because when I first talk to, especially young people about the philosophies or the concept of liberty. I find that I connect with them faster,

Starting point is 00:11:27 or initially when I talk about the moral reasoning behind it. Like if I say to somebody, you own your body, you own your mind, you own what you own, your property, and nobody should ever have the right to force you to do anything to yourself or for anyone else, and nobody should ever have the right to take your stuff. And when I say it like that, everybody agrees,

Starting point is 00:11:53 or at least the young people say, well, yeah, that makes lots of sense. I like that. But then when we go on the practical level, you talked about cooperation. I think it's important people understand that cooperation is voluntary. It's not-

Starting point is 00:12:04 It has to be. It's not forced. It has to be. It's not forced. And that's a tough one for people understand, especially when we talk about things on a grand scale. Like if we say, you talked about power and how power corrupts, people might hear that and say, well, what about if a corporation gets big and powerful? Why isn't that a problem? Why is it just government that's a problem?

Starting point is 00:12:26 Well, I think you should be skeptical of all concentrated power. You should be skeptical of big corporations too. But a lot of times you will see that the corporations that do things that we generally are turned off by, that's usually in collusion with government. A lot of the reasons why big corporations are big is that they've been able to game the system and the rules so that the small

Starting point is 00:12:49 upstarts can't get into business. And we're talking about certification and all that stuff. It's a classic example, but that happens all the time. If you can't afford to hire a guy to be your man in Washington, then you're disadvantaged in the business world. And it's a classic, it's always the case that the small businesses that make up the heart of the American economy, they're always getting screwed by big corporations and collusion with big government. But yeah, I like democratized power.

Starting point is 00:13:23 I think we should keep it as dispersed as possible. And sometimes libertarians confuse corporate America with free market capitalism. Those are two different things. Corporate America quite often is built on relationships in DC instead of of what they do for their customers. It free market capitalism is all about serving customers and creating things that customers didn't even know they need, like Steve Jobs did. We love entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship is always breaking down the system and reinventing it. Governments don't like that.

Starting point is 00:14:00 Yeah, many times what happens is you'll have an emerging market and it's very free because it's emerging. You can't regulate what doesn't exist. Then it grows and then the big players in that market now see that more competitions coming in. They want a limit competition and those are the ones that come together to create the regulations like you talked about hair braading or blow drying hair, you need to have so many hours.

Starting point is 00:14:27 That regulation didn't exist when that was first coming out. It happened later on when you've got these big players like, no, no, no, no, we want, we don't want anybody being able to come in and compete with us because if I'm a business, I know more competition for all intents and purposes is bad. If I'm the only, you know, if it's just me and another guy who have a gym in a big city, I'm gonna be able to get more business than if there's me and 15 other competitors.

Starting point is 00:14:53 We're watching this happen right now with Uber. I mean, you see this with, what are some companies that you know that you see that are big disruptors? Well, the entire sharing economy is a classic example of what we're talking about. It's Uber and Lyft and the ride sharing, it's Airbnb, but everything is being Uberized today. And in every single case, and think about what Uber does, it cuts out the middleman. It breaks up the monopoly

Starting point is 00:15:18 of taxi cabs in New York where you can't get a freaking cab. And it allows people to be their own bosses. This is everything that we should agree with left, right, and center, but in comments have come in and tried to break up that model because it's destroying a cash cow, which was the old taxi monopolies. Same thing with hotels and Airbnb, but from a libertarian perspective,

Starting point is 00:15:46 all of that stuff is a brutally efficient allocation of scarce resources. You're gonna empty seat in your car, in your driving, and you can fill that and make money for yourself, and also maybe put a few less cars on the road, but it's also what the left calls the sharing economy. We're actually working together in cooperation and there's benefits in the environment,

Starting point is 00:16:11 there's benefits to people that are trying to earn a little extra cash to pay for college, whatever it is, it's more freedom and that's a good thing, but man, that the insiders are trying to take it down. Now why we hear people say things like Uber is not regulated like tax, it's not going to be a safe or the drivers aren't going to be taking care of as much, they don't have benefits and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:16:38 Let's talk about that for a second. Is that true or is that just? Well, it's true in the sense that there are more regulations on cabs, but it's it's making the assumption that that somehow regulations that govern cabs were written in public interest. When in fact regulations are almost always written by people with self-interest. We're all self-interested, right? And it doesn't change when you become

Starting point is 00:17:06 a government agent. It doesn't change if you're lobbying the government to write regulations in a certain way. And, you know, we used to call them cartels, but the old taxi regulation system was a cartel that drove up prices and made it difficult to get a cab, it made it difficult to get a cab medallion, it made it difficult for young immigrants coming into this country that are looking for an entry-level job to get a job. And we want to break that all down. So I think this assumption that more regulation is in the public interest is a fundamental myth of, about, quote unquote, good government. No, it's not. Yeah. And the other thing too is it's assuming if there isn't government regulation, that's assuming there is no regulation. I think there's, that's a massive mistake because Uber is very regulated. It's just regulated by the consumers. You know, every time you get in a car

Starting point is 00:18:02 and Uber and you leave, you rate it and they rate you. And in fact, that's superior regulation because it's real time. So a cab can be terrible, a lot more times before he gets found out than, let's say, an Uber where right away I can look at the last rating and be like, oh, this guy got a one, I think I'm going to pick somebody else. And that's why the quality, I don't know anybody that prefers taking a cab over an Uber. You know, we've all experienced both, and Uber is just better.

Starting point is 00:18:29 It's more efficient. It's not only more efficient, it's better service. I get in the car, like I get in the water, and he's got candy in the back, and hey, do you wanna plug in your phone? Cab's never done that, you know, never done that for me before. So it's superior.

Starting point is 00:18:40 And here's the thing I wanna kind of bring up with you, Matt, is, you know, we have so many clear historical examples of Freedom versus non-freedom and objectively speaking speaking freedom is Superior and there's no there's no debating this we saw the fall of the Soviet Union We see what socialism does in countries like Venezuela and yet I just saw a poll done countries like Venezuela. And yet, I just saw a poll done not that long ago that showed that college students had a more favorable view of socialism

Starting point is 00:19:11 than they did of capitalism. Why? Like, what is going on here? Yeah, I've seen all of this polling and on one level, it sort of freaks you out. It's a little scary. Yeah, like what the hell's going on here? We're teaching these kids.

Starting point is 00:19:24 But I think part of it is definitional because I dug the, and the reason foundation has done a lot of pulling on millennials and their attitudes about capitalism and socialism and it's worth checking out. And they asked these, these saying, same young people that were saying socialism better than capitalism.

Starting point is 00:19:44 Do you believe that the government should own the means of production, which is the technical definition of socialism? And they're like, hell no, that's a stupid idea. So I think part of it is, if, you know, when they hear the word capitalism, they hear cronism, and they grew up under big bank bailouts, and they grew up watching corporations collude with government. So from their point of view, they don't understand what we say when we use that word. And I'm not even a big fan of that word for that reason. It has so much baggage. When they hear the word socialism,

Starting point is 00:20:16 they don't think about the Soviet Union. Bernie Sanders very adamantly said, I'm not talking about the Soviet Union. I'm talking about Scandinavia. When you ask them what socialism means to them, it means people working together from the bottom up to solve problems. And I'm like, that's not socialism, that's liberty. That's where the good stuff comes from. But whenever you give the government that much power, it's kind of shocking how quickly Venezuela went from the most wealthy country in Latin America just a few years ago to a place where people are dying

Starting point is 00:20:54 in the streets because they can't get food, they can't get medicine, and Nicholas Maduro is using that monopolized power, socialist power, to crush any dissent. He doesn't care how many people die because he's about power. That's socialism in practice, but I think a lot of young people are looking for that cooperative bottom-up community where they can work together to help their neighbors

Starting point is 00:21:21 and to make sure that they live in a good community, that never works if you're socializing power. Yeah, it's funny when Venezuela started going in that direction, you had some politicians and celebrities praising them. Bernie Sanders, one of them, oh, Venezuela is doing great things. They're trying to help the people and this is going to be awesome. And now they're silent. You don't hear anything coming to their mouth about what's going on over there. What are some of the fundamental, besides evil people with power, what are some of the fundamental reasons why socialism just doesn't work?

Starting point is 00:21:57 Well, the problem, whenever you centralize anything, you choose a winner and reject other ways of doing things. And I think that the two mythologies of any form of authoritarianism, and we could talk about fascism, we could talk about corporatism, socialism, communism, whatever label you want to give those isms, there's two assumptions that always apply. One is that we're going to find somebody that's good enough to wield all that power. They're not going to abuse it. They're going to do the right thing with that. The other thing that they assume is that that person

Starting point is 00:22:37 whoever it is is actually smart enough to redesign civil society from the top down. He's smart enough to redesign the economy. He's smart enough to redesign the economy. He's smart enough to replace social institutions like churches and community centers with one top down system. This is precisely what Mao Zedong tried to do in Communist China. Which resulted in how many tens of millions of... It was the worst slaughter of humanity. I think in the history of civilization, he killed 45 million people in just a couple of years.

Starting point is 00:23:14 It's breathtaking. You take the Soviet Union and Mao's China for instance, and you think about the body count. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate, just tell how shocking this number is. You're talking about 100 million people. If you wrapped the globe, head to toe, the corpses who died under socialism, you could almost wrap around the globe four times.

Starting point is 00:23:40 That's how many people, just these two experiments in socialism happened. And part of it was abuse of power, but it was really more of that arrogance that I'm going to redesign how it is that people feed themselves and how it is that they produce for the community. Mal decided that farmers should produce steel. And this was his grand plan to beat the United States in our economy. And as it turns out, everybody starved because you can't.

Starting point is 00:24:14 You can't, it has to be bottom up and it has to be people figuring out how to solve these problems for themselves. So it's, you know, this isn't just socialism, by the way. You know, fascism and other brands of authoritarianism. To varying degrees, they want to plan things from the top down. It's in the name of American greatness. It's in the name of equality.

Starting point is 00:24:34 Whatever it is that buzzword is, the opposite's true. It just doesn't work out the way they say. I think people need to understand that whatever your intentions are, understand that no one's smart enough to do this for us, we got to figure it out for ourselves. Yeah, to go deeper on that, my a couple areas of learning for me that really helped me understand this was, I loved watching, you know, I did read Hayek and Mises and I loved watching videos with Milton Friedman and Learn Liberty has great videos and they had this great video explaining prices and why prices exist and what they actually reflect and

Starting point is 00:25:15 Through watching that I was able to understand that prices really are They tell you so much about something that you don't you don't realize you just see a price of something you think Oh, this cost five dollars, but what that's telling you is telling you how much about something that you don't realize. You just see a price of something you think, oh, this costs $5. But what that's telling you is, it's telling you how much of that there's available, what the demand is. It's helping allocate resources to make that particular product. It's telling all the producers of all the products that lead to making that product. It's the most accurate way of communicating to individuals to allocate resources and to improve efficiency. And you know, what I learned from all that was that wealth wasn't money.

Starting point is 00:25:51 Money is just represents wealth. Well, wealth is really more efficiency. And it's impossible. It is impossible for one man or a group of men or women to figure out the most efficient way to do everything all the time, even if they were to do surveys, those surveys aren't in real time. And if they were, you know, people buy things differently

Starting point is 00:26:12 than what they say they're gonna do. Like, when you, those prices tell you so much about things that it makes things so much more efficient. I mean, at the Soviet Union, would have fields of wheat that would go rotten because of the inefficiencies in trying to plan where Things go and what to do so even though you may have great intentions You end up starving a lot of people because it turns out figuring out how to

Starting point is 00:26:36 You know manage a in a nation is It's impossible to do without letting the people do it kind of themselves and And the other side of that is, if you're this leader with this grand vision, not everybody's going to agree with you. What do you do with that? You know, what do you do when you tell everybody they have to do something? What would Mao do to the farmers who said, I don't want to make steel? He killed them. And that's what are your other options?

Starting point is 00:27:00 You either force them out or you, or they move in. And it kind of highlights this underlying, you know, it's almost like humans need this underlying philosophy. And if they follow the wrong philosophy, we're capable of doing some incredibly terrible things. And socialism is just this, it's just this wrong, it's this wrong philosophy. And it tends to promote these type of behaviors where You know if people don't agree with me because I think I'm so right we need to force them to agree with me

Starting point is 00:27:32 Why is it stayed around for so long then what is it about it? That's a great question Why why why are people drawn to it still? I think I mean this I ask this question every day because it's precisely What I'm trying to to hack the answer on this because it so obviously has failed again and again and again and you can cite the body count. But I think part of it is, if we believe in liberty, one of the failures has been ours. And I was turned on to these ideas by Ein Rand. And she talks about selfishness as a virtue. And sometimes we fall into this caricature that because you believe in Liberty, you don't give a damn about anybody else. And it's all about you and all that stuff. And

Starting point is 00:28:16 we sound that way when we talk about the efficiency of markets and all that stuff. But that's not really what Liberty is all about. Liberty's about, yes, it's about pursuing your own dreams and choosing happiness as you see fit, but it's also that responsibility that we have. If you see a problem in your community, who's going to step up? Do you want to outsource that to a politician and let them solve that problem? People love to use that excuse. Like, oh, my taxes are so high, the government's got it covered. But that should be our responsibility.

Starting point is 00:28:52 And government corrupts that sense of community that we all have. Is it what we're lazy then? Is that what it is? Is it what we're lazy? That's just easier. Let them handle it. I don't want to deal with it. Are we scared?

Starting point is 00:29:03 I think it's just easier to let them handle it. I don't want to deal with it, are we scared? I think it's all the above, and I also think that if you grew up with the government providing healthcare, you can't conceive of a world where healthcare will be provided, and by the way, it'll be cheaper and more available if we let markets take care of those things. So, and politicians for all of their weaknesses,

Starting point is 00:29:27 they can always make an empty promise and it sounds so compelling. I'm going to give you free healthcare. And we're going to say in response, well, that's not gonna work and I'll tell you all the reasons is not gonna work. And we can't make a promise, but we can promise that together we can solve this problem.

Starting point is 00:29:45 What's the main fear people have towards libertarian ideas? It mainly like anarchism or something they feel like it's too chaotic, like the ideas? Yeah, there's always qualifiers. Well, I believe in freedom, but maybe not when it comes to speech, because people can say really hateful things, and we shouldn't allow for that. Or I believe in freedom, but everybody should have access to, everyone should have health insurance. And there's always a qualifier, but we need to do a better job explaining how it is that free speech is a good thing. How it is that markets and patients and doctors working together and making choices

Starting point is 00:30:33 is going to create a better healthcare system for everyone. And it's difficult because sometimes you can't point to a real life example because the government has monopolized the provision of something. But then you have ubers and things like that where you say, see prices went down, more people have jobs and it's more efficient and everybody wins. That we have to find those examples. I think, I mean, is it Amazon? Didn't Amazon partner with Berkshire and another investment group to create like a healthcare system

Starting point is 00:31:06 with their own for Amazon? It's kind of like a free market approach to providing healthcare for their employees. Why is healthcare so expensive then? If I know people are thinking this, well ours is more free market. Why is healthcare so terrible than an American or an expensive? Well of course, our system has never been free market.

Starting point is 00:31:24 It's what we call a third-party payment system, right? You have since the Great Depression, the government decided that there would be a preferential tax treatment to company-provided healthcare plans. So right now, for most people, you get your health insurance through your company. And that means that you want to pay as little as possible Now for most people, you get your health insurance through your company.

Starting point is 00:31:45 And that means that you want to pay as little as possible and you want to use as much as possible. And somebody at an insurance company or your personal office is making decisions about what you can and can't have, there's no market there. And there's all sorts of regulations and corruptions in that. And that's why ObamaCare, the first thing ObamaCare tried to do, was force young healthy people to buy this gold-plated insurance plan that they absolutely don't need. And by the way, they couldn't afford it either. It was called the individual mandate.

Starting point is 00:32:19 And the idea was that you were going to subsidize the use of healthcare for other people by forcing people to buy something they didn't need. Now, that's the individual mandate part at least has recently been repealed, but it makes no sense to do things that way. People need to make those decisions for themselves and young people in particular. they need to buy some very affordable catastrophic healthcare plan that says you're on your own unless you come down with some awful form of cancer or something that's going to be a catastrophic event in your life. And at that point, let's say it kicks in at $5,000 out of pocket, you're covered. But everything else, you don't need an insurance plan. You need to be able to save for the future so that you can take care of yourself.

Starting point is 00:33:12 It's got to be based on choice. It can't be based on someone else deciding for you what you need to do with your life. And if you look at the sectors in the economy that go nuts, like insane inflation, healthcare, education, or always at the top, like the skyrocketing, those happen to be two of the most regulated government involved industries in the United States and the world. Yeah, for markets to work well, you have to allow the signals to be accurate in the market. And what regulations can do and what government can do is they can skew this signal so terribly

Starting point is 00:33:55 that the market then reads that signal and responds accordingly. So an example is education. If the government comes out and says, Hey, higher education is, it's imperative, it's super important, people need to have it, it's great, which is all, can be true. But because we say that, now what we're gonna do is we're gonna make these laws that say, you have to give loans to this many people for school and we have to make it super easy to get money

Starting point is 00:34:24 and we have to guarantee this money. What ends up happening is you get lots of money that goes a lot of people, the risk isn't calculated properly because that's a signal, that's a market signal. And so now you've got all these people with all this money who are going to do a higher education and the cost that means the cost of education now inflates because the market is reading that there's all this available

Starting point is 00:34:44 money, it's no different than what happened to the housing crisis where banks were giving out loans partially because they had to and partially because they knew that there was no risk. Like, well shit, you're giving me five grand to go gamble in Vegas and if I lose it all, I'm gonna get another five grand. Well, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna gamble every last penny of that.

Starting point is 00:35:02 And so it inflates the price of everything so much, and our answer is throw more money at it, give people more money. Whereas if it were more accurate, you wouldn't be able to get a massive student loan for a liberal arts degree or something else like that, where you're probably not gonna end up earning it back. And less money means the market has to compete better. There's going to be more opportunities and options, but people don't see that what they see is less money, therefore less people are going to get the education. Especially today, which is crazy to me when we have access to so much free information online, it's crazy to me that we even continue to make that case. But the more we're involved, the more we skew the market,

Starting point is 00:35:45 and the more we blame capitalism versus what the real problem is, which is, you know, are intruded into the market. Let's talk about some current events. We have a president who's in office now who is extremely polarizing. And I know people who are... I don't think I know anybody on the left who likes him. I know some libertarians like some stuff about him.

Starting point is 00:36:06 What are your views on Trump and what do you do? I know he's cut a tremendous amount of regulations. I believe he's cut more regulations in the years and it's been an office than Reagan did in the last eight years or whatever in his total years. Is that, I mean, what do you think of Trump so far? Well, just to come clean, I supported Rand Paul in the presidential primary and the Republican Party, and when Rand pulled out of the race, I actually switched and supported Gary Johnson. And I was doing political work for super PACs for both of those

Starting point is 00:36:38 guys. So I was not a Trump guy by any means. And I'll say this first, I think one of the things that Trump has done that is probably a long-term service is he's punctured this mythology of a romance with the presidency and this idea that if we just elect the right guy and he's a good family guy and he really cares about me, that's all I need to do. I need to elect the right guy and give him the power and let it all go forward. There's nothing romantic about the Trump president. He's kind of a shister and he says what people want to hear.

Starting point is 00:37:22 And then he'll say the opposite tomorrow. But let's be honest, haven't politicians always been doing this to us? Yeah, and the extreme version of it. Yeah, and didn't Barack Obama do the same thing, but man, he was so good that it... He sounded good. Yeah, it didn't sound like BS when Obama was doing it, but when Trump does it, you're like, okay, that guy's BS-ing me, but let's be honest. All politicians do that. So I think there's an upside to sort of the hysteria that he's created on the left because I hope. And you're seeing

Starting point is 00:37:52 this sometimes at least, they've rediscovered the Bill of Rights and they've rediscovered the separation of powers between the executive branch and the legislative branch. And when Obama was crossing those lines, they didn't seem to care that much. And I think there's hypocrisy on both sides on this, by the way, like when a Democrat's in power, the Republicans are all about the Constitution and they love the Fourth Amendment. And state power and all that.

Starting point is 00:38:20 And now they're a little less concerned when Trump does those things. So I think we should be skeptical of whoever's in office. And I would judge Trump the same way as Judge Obama. Like I worked with Barack Obama in the Justice Department on criminal justice reform. I think we're putting too many young nonviolent kids in jail and I was willing to work with those guys on that.

Starting point is 00:38:47 Even though I'd been a pretty harsh critic of a lot of Obama's economic policies, my attitude to Trump is the same way. If you cry wolf every time Trump tweets something stupid, I don't think we're going to get a chance to mobilize people when he does something substantially wrong. And I think the left, I've worked with a lot of progressive friends on issues that we have in common. And I tell them every time, like, you can't freak out every time Trump tweets, because when he does something that we need to join arms and fight him against, everyone stopped listening at that point.

Starting point is 00:39:25 That's a good point. It's an extremely good point. I mean, I'm not, there's some things Trump's done that I like, some things that a lot of things he's done. I don't like. I didn't vote for him, I'm not a supporter, but they are making it hard. They, I constantly have to defend him,

Starting point is 00:39:41 which I don't like. Yeah. Like, please don't make me have to defend. Yeah, don't make me have to defend him, which I don't like. Yeah. Like, please don't make me have to defend. So you should be kidding, Uncle. Yeah, don't make me have to defend him all the time because you're attacking him on stupid shit, like attack him on the real stuff, not on the fact that he hurt your feelings.

Starting point is 00:39:56 And really, there's this, I mean, what do you think, you talked about free speech earlier. And I don't, I mean, I love learning about history and I love you know reading about you know American history and it just it seems like speech is under attack today in a different and scary way much more different scary way than it ever was I mean college campuses like you know Berkeley these to fight for their ability to say whatever they wanted and And now, if you are a conservative or... We're in a red hat. Yeah, or you're worrying about, you know, make America a great hat,

Starting point is 00:40:30 or you're a white, straight, you know, Christian male. Like, they need to silence you and shut you up. Like, what's going on here with that? It's, I mean, it's so bizarre in campus that this whole notion of safe spaces is, is anithetical to everything that I think America stands for, because being uncomfortable and failure and risk and all that stuff, and being willing to let somebody that you fundamentally disagree with speak in public, those are all core American values

Starting point is 00:41:02 that have somehow magically, just in the last couple of years, it seems like these values have disappeared with young people. So you have that going on, and I'm hoping that that's a cancer that's on college campuses. And I think the college campus model is probably dying out anyway because of the cost structure we were just talking about. It doesn't make any sense to spend 100 grand for a degree in European media studies and then go work at Starbucks. Or even business, which is a great degree to have because now you're just with the other

Starting point is 00:41:39 millions of people in the state of the country. Right. Well, let's be honest, it'd be better to like, if you really want a job training, go get a job. Don't go get an MBA that teaches you the theory about how to create wealth, go try to create wealth. But there's, I think, and that's probably part of why this speech is so under fire on college campuses because it's so weird inside there. But the countervailing force, of course, is social media and the democratization of knowledge

Starting point is 00:42:14 and we mentioned Hayek earlier and he talked about the price system as a communications network. I would love to see him opine on Facebook and social media and the way it breaks up the Marxist Professor Cartel, the way it breaks up the mainstream media cartel. And I love more speech. I even love fake news because there is a kind of balance to fake news. Some blogger in their basement is calling out New York Times when they do fake news.

Starting point is 00:42:50 And you know, we're so worried that that that blogger in that basement is not qualified to be a news guy like, come on. This let it let it all work itself out. And they'll be more accountability when when there are only three TV networks and Walter Cronkite, you guys aren't old enough, but he used to tell us that's the way it is. Mm-hmm. You get to know that that's the way how I feel.

Starting point is 00:43:10 Yeah. Yeah, you get like 20 minutes. That was his sign off, right? Every night, right? You get 20 minutes of news every night and it was curated by someone from the top down and Walter Cronkite said, that's the way it is. Well, you didn't have a chance to like, tweet back. No, that's not it it is. Well, you didn't have a chance to like, tweet back. That's not it.

Starting point is 00:43:25 Bullshit. Yeah. So I think we should embrace like, I call it beautiful chaos. Campuses are these safe places, but in the real world, there's plenty of speech and the more the better, even if it upsets you, even if Donald Trump's tweet upsets you, it's better to have those arguments in public and work it out. I feel like he was a wrench, you know what I mean? I feel like it was just, he was a response to that particular movement

Starting point is 00:43:55 where people were kind of sick of it and so like, well, let's, I feel like we always kind of do that. You'll far left, far right, far left, far right, I feel like we've just ping pong, yeah, back and forth all the time. You know, Sal brought up, we're talking about economics, the banking system. You're a person that would love to ask your opinion if you have one on what's going on with cryptocurrencies.

Starting point is 00:44:12 What's your thought on that? Yeah, first of all, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are all built on something called blockchain. And blockchain, I think, is one of the most important revolutions in technology that we're only starting to see why that matters so much, because it basically allows for people to securely contract with each other anonymously. Instantly, too. Instantly, without some third-party enforcement mechanism. So without courts, without governments, without contracts,

Starting point is 00:44:47 and that is so radical that I think people haven't even quite appreciated what that means. Cryptocurrencies, the big problem with them right now is that the government's lashing back, and Bitcoin has taken a beating, and I think it has more to do with the fact that governments are threatening to regulate it, governments like South Korea is apparently threatened

Starting point is 00:45:14 to ban Bitcoin. By the way, Bitcoin is a lifeline in Venezuela. If you want to earn a living or you want to trade goods because their currency is Crap, so you can't you can't get food imported and they can't produce food inside But you can use things like Bitcoin to Trade with the outside world in a way that that is profoundly liberating So I I think it's really important, but government has a monopoly on money

Starting point is 00:45:44 It's gonna be really interesting to see how this shakes out over the next five days. And they want to shut it down, but I'll tell you my little, my little nonprofit for the people, we've gone through two vendors so far to be able to accept Bitcoin as an actual organization. And I just got noticed from the second vendor that we use that they're not going to do it anymore, because the regulation is too much. So they're starting to bleed this very robust platform with nitpicking regulations.

Starting point is 00:46:19 And it's because they don't like the competition. Like, imagine if you can trade without using US dollars, it means that the Fed can't manipulate the price of that money, they can't manipulate the price of credit, they can't bail out Wall Street, they can't fund the kind of debt that our current government is funding. We're now like a $20 trillion.

Starting point is 00:46:41 You're stripping them with the most power they potentially probably have. That is, that's all the power. So they're going to try to stop it. But this is the beautiful clash of our lifetime, the liberating forces of technology versus attempts by incumbents, including governments, to shut that down. You read the protests in Iran. I just did a piece about this. The government in Iran, it's called them Islamofashes, whatever you want to call them. They're just authoritarians.

Starting point is 00:47:15 They essentially shut down the internet. So there's always a work around. And they shut down what's app, and then they use virtual private networks instead. And it's like whack-a-mold, they're trying to stop people from being more free, and it's very difficult in the internet age to do that. Yeah, it's like once the toothpaste is out of the tube.

Starting point is 00:47:39 Yeah, good luck. So what's going on over there then, and around with this revolution? I've seen pictures of girls, you know, taking off their huge jobs and you know, what's happening over there? Why is there why is this even happening? I think it's because of technology. There's there's always been I think people inherently want to be free and people inherently push against authoritarianism and all of its flavors but back when the government

Starting point is 00:48:07 controlled the flow of information, it was very difficult. Of course, people still wanted to be free. And you could look at Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Solidarity in Poland. There's always the pushback of people against authoritarianism. But now, with social media, that stuff catches fire. And you can create massive movements overnight when the government has overstepped its bounds.

Starting point is 00:48:31 The response by the Iranian government is typical of authoritarianism. It's been brutal. And not only are they shutting down technology, but they're killing people. That's what they do. But I think it's very difficult to keep a lid on freedom in our current age. And I'm hoping that our government doesn't get to involved because I think that would be a mistake. I think that would actually undermine the people that are really looking for freedom in that country. Yeah, I think if we stepped in, what might end up happening is they might end up creating

Starting point is 00:49:07 a kind of a common enemy like, you know, the US is why we're doing this and then everybody's against us and it's no longer about them and then which which has happened. But that happens all the time. We bombed the shit out of some country and then say, no, we're helping, really. Yeah, it's true. Wonder why that doesn't work. Yeah, I can't imagine. Yeah. So is it, you know, we're talking about how people

Starting point is 00:49:30 inherently don't like authoritarians, but then it seems like as society's prosper, as free society's prosper, then is it because people are spoiled and then they start to want to go in the opposite direction? I know we've become less free. We used to be one of the top five free, you know, countries in freedom, was it the heritage in next,

Starting point is 00:49:51 I think, and now we're like 15th or something like that. You see this in Europe as well. Why is that? Why do we tend to try to go backwards? Because we just get spoiled, and now all of a sudden we believe in the unicorn of government. Well, we're spoiled, but we take certain things for granted. We take for granted the tremendous prosperity that we have and all of the choices and luxuries

Starting point is 00:50:15 that we have that are unimaginable in Venezuela today. And so you find it does, it is a bit of a pendulum thing where people get so used to freedom that they forget where the stuff comes from. They don't know that it's because of freedom they just assume it's there. Because when I was born, there was a whole foods on every corner. I can get my latte exactly the way I want it. That's my baseline understanding of what civil society is. There isn't that stuff in Venezuela.

Starting point is 00:50:48 You're picking through garbage. And so you see the countervailing thirst for liberty quite often comes in authoritarian countries where they've seen what governments all about. I have friends in Lithuania who were there when the Soviet Union would gun their parents down in the streets. They have no illusions about what big governments all about. We don't really see that as much in this country. We see it sometimes with militarized police and the way that they handle crowds and stuff

Starting point is 00:51:21 like that. And hopefully that's a teachable moment for people. But generally speaking, we don't see the government hurting people. Now what about the arguments on inequalities? I hear this all the time from the, you know, kind of the far left, which we'll call them, I don't know, socialistic Democrats or whatever you want to call them. They will talk about income inequality and how a few people at the top have all the money

Starting point is 00:51:53 and most people have less. Like, what do we do about that? You know, I think we were talking about education and housing earlier, and one of the ironies of government policies that says everyone should own a home, everyone should have a college education. These are things that Barack Obama declared.

Starting point is 00:52:15 Most people don't own homes, and most people don't go to college, which means that they are subsidizing the people that are now getting government loans to do these things. Think about it. It's a taking from have-nots and giving it to have that usually is how redistribution of wealth works. It's not about taking from billionaires. There's billionaires in Venezuela today. There's billionaires in every country, and they have the lawyers and the goons and whatever it takes to protect that money

Starting point is 00:52:50 and they have accountants and they have ability to protect their wealth. The real problem when you get into wealth redistribution is growing that 20-year-old kid that wants that first opportunity. That you always create that barrier and you do it through taxes, you do it through regulation, you do it through the minimum wage, you do it through forced unionism.

Starting point is 00:53:15 All of these things are, you know, that's the platform of, we need to make things more equal, but that's not what happens. The opposite happens. And the only way to make things more equal is to allow people to be free to contract, free to take a job, free to do job training, free to take an internship where they're not going to pay you anything because they're going to teach you something that's invaluable. And we prevent all of these things in the name of equality. And I also think there's this common misconception that the economy is a fixed pie in which if I get more of that pie, that means everybody else gets less.

Starting point is 00:53:57 But in reality, the pie grows as market economies grow. And then the other thing that I think is important for people to understand is if you have two people, one man has $100,000, another man has $1,000 and they both invest their money equally and they both grow their money at 10%. The guy with $100,000 has now increased his wealth the same percentage wise but he's got way more money because 10% of 100 grand is a lot more than 10% of a thousand and money allows you to do that. There's also something I learned recently. It's called a Pareto distribution. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but you see Pareto distributions in all creative markets, anything involving creativity. So like you'll notice that a very small percentage of scientists create most of the scientific literature, a very small percentage of scientists create most of the scientific

Starting point is 00:54:46 literature. A very small percentage of painters create most of the valuable art, a very small percentage of musicians create the music that we all like, and a very small percentage of, you know, hardworking, conscientious, you know, intelligent individuals create the products that we want to buy. And that's a natural distribution that happens regardless, even if you try to force equality through socialism, I mean, in the, in the disparity in a country like North Korea,

Starting point is 00:55:13 as massive as well. I mean, you've got, it's supposed to be everybody's equal, but you've definitely got the haves and the have-nots. It's just, it's done through political power. For me personally, I don't mind if someone has way more so long as it's the result of the fact that they're doing, that they have, they're more intelligent, they work harder and they're creating shit that people like.

Starting point is 00:55:37 That's when I have no problem with that, and that's when I have no problem with that distribution, but people tend to not see that, and they see that there's halves and have knots, and it doesn't seem fair. How do you feel about that? Is that natural? Is it natural that people are just going to be that way?

Starting point is 00:55:53 I don't think anybody's equal anyway, no matter what. People are never going to be equal in outcome, and the goal of a decent government is to create an equality of opportunity. You know what? Barriers to entry for someone that's trying to do better for themselves and their family. I just had a conversation with an Uber driver. He's an immigrant from Ethiopia, and he was marveling at how easy it was to get something here, to get a job, to get an opportunity, to even to participate in the military.

Starting point is 00:56:31 He was the first thing he did as he came over and he signed up. And we take all that for granted, but a quality of outcomes, you could argue, save for the political class in North Korea. Things are incredibly equal in North Korea because everybody's starving. Everybody's starving in such horrific ways that they've completely dehumanized and beaten the life out of the population. The alternative is to have growth and opportunity, And yes, some people are going to get extremely wealthy if people are free to produce.

Starting point is 00:57:11 But everybody has that opportunity and people don't starve in our country. And again, we take that as just the given. Nobody should starve in this country. And I think we also take for granted that people have different value systems. You know, I know a lot of people look at a CEO of a large company and think, oh, that lucky guy and or girl and they don't, you know, they have all this money, but they don't realize

Starting point is 00:57:39 that that person works a hundred hours a week. That's what he sacrificed to get there. Yeah, it's just, you's just stress out of their mind. There's a reason why his job or her job pays so much money. And people on an individual basis have different values. And then you can break people up into categories, like one of the biggest arguments that I've heard through in politics today is this idea of this gender pay gap.

Starting point is 00:58:06 Let's talk about that for a second. What is the gender pay gap about and is it because people are sexist against women? You know, there's been a lot of studies and they're conflicting studies, but the gender pay gap is this theory that women don't make the same amount of money for the same equal work that men do. And it fails to look at the life cycle of a career and the fact that women sometimes make different choices. Sometimes they want to take off 10, 15 years to have a family. Sometimes they want flexibility in their job schedule.

Starting point is 00:58:43 And sometimes men want the same choices, but on average, men are guys that go into the workforce and work their way up through a career and they don't take that time off. So I think it's wrong to lump people into categories. It's not men versus women. into categories, right? It's not men versus women. It's everybody in the workforce making different choices for themselves. About like, you know, most people don't want to work a hundred hours a week. But if you want to run a successful company, you work all the time. That's just the way it is. You don't have weekends, you don't have anything. Other people don't want to work more than 20 hours a week, and maybe their family situation allows that opportunity for them. I think it's a mistake for us, you know, the planners from the top deciding what's acceptable

Starting point is 00:59:35 for people. Like, we should do that. But, you know, the war against women was a narrative that the Democrats had had ready and they've used that card for for most of my life actually and they were going to use it long before Donald Trump came along and he just happened to be a perfect target. Particularly right target. So just the right things.

Starting point is 00:59:57 Yeah. Yeah, the thing though, the what I like to present to people when they bring that up to me is I look at things from an economic point of view and I think, okay, I know that the number one motivator or goal of a business is to create a profit, right? Which that's fine, it should be, and they should have to do that through serving the consumer. But if a company knew that it could save a full one-fourth of its cost in paying employees simply by just hiring women, that's all you would see right now. There would only women would be employed by a lot of companies because they pay women one-fourth less than they pay men, but yet you don't see that.

Starting point is 01:00:38 And that's because that's not, it doesn't exist. The reality is generally people tend to have, men and women have different values and things that they value, but on an individual basis, if you compare individual to individual, exactly the same outcome, you'll see that there isn't one because the market really favors your productivity. That's like number one.

Starting point is 01:00:59 Like everything else is, come second, third, fourth, and all, but it's really about your productivity. And it's too bad that politics has pushed so many narratives forward and really confused people so we don't really know, you know, really, you know, what to believe. So... Yeah, my wife was here and she's a career girl. She's always wanted to work and that's been very highly valued in her life. Her version of feminism says that we should all be treated the same in the workforce. And today, feminism sometimes means the opposite where you want special treatment

Starting point is 01:01:37 because of your sex. And if she was here, she'd tell you that really screws women over. If you start creating all of these special carve outs and treatment for women, we're not going to get hired for the same opportunities. And that's just the perverse incentives that government creates. And it sounds good, it's well-intentioned, but it hurts women. It doesn't hurt men, it hurts women. It does.

Starting point is 01:02:03 Let's talk about your, you were talking about your nonprofit organization, would you mind telling your audience a little bit about what that is and what it does and what you do? Sure, our group is called Free the People and we specifically set out a couple years ago to use technology and video and social media to turn young people on to liberty. And that's, it gets right at this conversation we're having about why or so many people romance by the ideas of socialism. I don't think that that millennials are inclined towards socialism at all. They don't like authority, they don't like top down, they don't want someone else controlling

Starting point is 01:02:37 their lives. But we need to translate economics and political theory into powerful storytelling. And that's what we're trying to do. Mostly short videos, but young people also consume a lot of documentary style things on YouTube. They listen to podcasts. They just don't go to Walter Cronkite. They don't actually go to the Marxist professor.

Starting point is 01:03:04 They don't go to government. So how do we make it more accessible for people to do that? And we drive a lot of traffic, and we drive a lot of eyeballs. And we partner with conservatives. I have a partnership with a conservative organization. I have a partnership with with the number of progressive organizations. And that's because I think liberty is kind of in the middle today like we're not We're not ideologues in the sense that that we're gonna choose one tribe and just hate the other tribe We're trying to promote these values that I think are common to all human beings Which is pretty challenging when you look at like you

Starting point is 01:03:41 Advertising that's out there when we talk about economics and then when you look at like political views I mean those and we talk about economics, and then when you look at political views, those two areas are probably some of the most manipulated areas that we deal with. That's got to be such a challenge with the message that you guys have. It's all, I have a burning hatred for clickbait, which is really designed to just get you hating on people that you're preconceived to not like anyway.

Starting point is 01:04:04 So it used to be scary pictures of Barack Obama, and now it's scary pictures of Donald Trump. But click like on that and you've educated nobody about anything, and you've only deeper embedded that sort of tribal animosity that we feel right now. And I don't think that's not who we are as people. And this is a downside of technology. But the upside would be, let's seek out some common values. Let's have a civil conversation. Let's let's let's talk about things that we're not supposed to talk about, but let's let's do it in a in a

Starting point is 01:04:37 decent way. Talk about some of the challenges that you've dealt with in with that because that's something that you know a little bit of our history. Like we were three guys that been in fitness for between 15 to 20 years and we're trying to disrupt the fitness industry, calling out a lot of the bullshit that's out there because our entire career has been spent watching these companies market to insecurities, just like what you're saying right now with clip-bait. So here we are now and we've grown to be a pretty large company and trying to scale this business without using tactics like that is extremely difficult.

Starting point is 01:05:08 So what are some of the things you guys have come to find out or what you're learning about this whole YouTube world and social media world and then trying to navigate through it while also promoting a good message without using the same bullshit tactics. Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a huge market opportunity for people that don't do clickbait.

Starting point is 01:05:27 And it's a grossly underserved market. And you have to have enough faith in people that if you give them different ideas and you try to talk to them as thoughtful people, they're going to take that extra time to find you out. And clickbait's always gonna be there, but the alternative is most of America. Most of America is more thoughtful than the clickbaits. And when you read the troll comments on a Facebook post, that is not representative

Starting point is 01:06:02 of the people that you want to talk to. So I think the other thing that we've been very aggressive about is experimentation and failure. And we throw almost anything against the wall. And we do heavy stuff on economics and we do corny stuff on just having fun and everything in between. Like we'll do devastating videos about the worst that humans can do against each other under socialism and then we'll make fun of John Bolton's mustache. And that's the whole gamut of things, but it's all designed to engage people and you drop some Easter eggs in there where people see that and they want to learn more. And you have to have the meat to back up the engaging

Starting point is 01:06:51 social videos and make it so that anybody can self-educate on the things that you're trying to talk about. It feels to me a lot like the longer form content would do well with you guys. So like YouTube videos and also podcasts versus like hardball or one of the can you describe like your experience with those types of shows where they don't really allow you to even express your ideas in full. Yeah, so I used to do a hardball a lot with with Chris Matthews. I saw that I was cringing and there's one episode in particular that I remember because my My earphone was screwed up. So whenever I spoke there was this echo that that echoed like three times So it was impossible to talk back to him

Starting point is 01:07:34 but when Chris Matthew starts yelling at you, you just shut up and let him let him go and normally And the reason I would do it so much is he would actually let you make your points. Bill Mar is the same way. I've been on Bill Mar a bunch of times. And as long as you can make your point, I think it's actually better to go on quote, the enemy show. I agree. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:59 And, you know, I've never been like assaulted for being this crazy libertarian. People will come up in the airport once in a while and say something like, I saw you on Bill Mar and I disagree with everything you said. And I'm like, oh, here it comes. And but they usually go on and say, but I appreciate the way that you explained your ideas and you really made me think about some things. So I think tone, like when you're attacking the health industrial complex, tone probably matters and making sure that we should have that righteous indignation and rage against

Starting point is 01:08:36 the machine about all the things that the establishment is doing wrong, but let's be conscious of a tone that actually makes people want to listen to what you have to say. You have a very positive, I feel like a positive outlook on how things are or where they're moving forward, which is very different from the, I guess the mood that you get from any other, I don't know, political commentator, pundit,

Starting point is 01:09:02 or whatever, where it's like doom and gloom. And it's funny listening to you, you know, you do make a lot of fantastic points. Like when I think about the poll that I told you about with college students and socialism, in the same, I mean, in the same sense, or the same sentence, like millennials are more entrepreneurial than previous generations.

Starting point is 01:09:23 They actually value entrepreneurship. And I know I see we have some that work for us. And they're way more entrepreneur-minded than previous generations. Like I talk to kids now and you ask them, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I'm getting things like, oh, I want to have a YouTube channel

Starting point is 01:09:38 or I want to start a business on the internet. And it wasn't like that a couple generations ago. So I'm wondering if we just, because the loud, the extremes tend to be the loudest, that maybe we have this distorted view of what's really going on. I think so. And I think language is so important. I have this, I mentioned I have this working relationship with some progressive friends. And the first time I joined them in a closed-door meeting,

Starting point is 01:10:06 I realized that even though they were speaking perfect English, I really didn't understand what they were saying because their language was so tribal and they have certain ways of saying things. And I ended up telling them, as I'm trying to understand where you guys are coming from, but I don't even understand what you're talking about. And then I went back to one of my libertarian hangouts and I realized, we do the same damn thing. Good awareness there. Yeah, we got all this secret handshake stuff that we do. And so listening to trying to figure out what people are actually trying to say, like when young people say that they're interested in socialism,

Starting point is 01:10:41 it's not enough. I mean, that pull itself is kind of click baity, right? And it would be more interesting to actually have a follow-up conversation with people that are intrigued by socialism, say, what are you looking for? What do you think that you're trying to accomplish with that word? And you'll quite often find that they mean something fundamentally different than you may. It's a great point, I even think of it that way.

Starting point is 01:11:06 When I look forward, I see things being more and more free, but not necessarily because the ideas of freedom are more popular more so because I think technology is just kind of forcing it that way. I don't think government knows what to do with these emerging markets because they don't know what to regulate because they just don't know. Like Uber, there's no way Uber would have existed

Starting point is 01:11:32 had government officials known what it was gonna be. Well, we've seen this in the marijuana industry too, not that long ago. I mean, I was a part of that whole movement here in the Bay Area and I really believe what took so long is just government trying to figure out how they're gonna get get their hands in. Of course.

Starting point is 01:11:47 Of course. It's like, why did it take this long? Well, let's allow some clubs so we can track stats and numbers and see exactly what it's producing. And then we'll figure out how we're going to get our hands. We'll require some patents. Yeah. And then they make more, and then they have enough money to lobby and compete with the alcohol

Starting point is 01:12:00 system. And the irony, the irony, if somebody who really understands economics realized, too, we're not even solving the black market problem because then they put so many taxes involved in it. It drives the medical marijuana industry, the price is up, so there still is a black market that exists. So how shitty is that that we've now have all these cannabis clubs and we're doing such a great thing, but yet we're still not getting rid of the black market because of all this fucking taxation that's gone inside of it. It's unreal to me. Well, that was a dirty deal that we did with government and

Starting point is 01:12:31 incumbents, particularly pharmaceutical companies, alcohol companies. Those are the primary opponents in the state of Utah where they're trying to legalize medical cannabis on the ballot. But we made this deal. You can tax the shit out of it if you blood it be legal. You have to shake hands with them. Yeah, it's bullshit. Yeah, and we'll work through that.

Starting point is 01:12:54 I think we did need to get to market and show that, children are not going to be dying in the streets because we legalize adult use of cannabis in Colorado and Washington and now in California. I mean, I think it goes back to that problem like people need to see how the market's going to function. And it's going to be fine and the demagoguery is going to go away once people see that it's okay.

Starting point is 01:13:17 But yes, they're gonna push a lot of people into the black market because they're gonna try to text the shit out of it. And that's gonna have to work itself out. But, you know, the Uber and Lyft and the democratization of knowledge, it all looks kind of chaotic right now. And think about, like, you know, we got Donald Trump, we have Bernie Sanders, we have all of these political movements all over the world that seem to be vacillating from extreme left to extreme right. And you could look at that and say, wow, this is all fucked up.

Starting point is 01:13:54 Or you could say, wow, more people are in franchise now. And the two party duopoly that used to give us two flavors of the same damn thing is being broken up. And you're seeing that, yeah, there's democratic socialists and there is substantial minority in this country. There's libertarians, there's conservatives, there's all these different flavors of people's politics. And I think that is generally a good thing.

Starting point is 01:14:22 We're seeing more people with more voices. It's happening in the marketplace. It's happening in politics. And this is why I'm optimistic about the long run of liberty, because I think we have a pretty cool set of ideas that are consistent with how people actually live and strive and achieve. And we just need to connect with a much bigger audience than we have in the past. It seems that way.

Starting point is 01:14:47 We have politicians now who actually call themselves libertarian, Rand Paul's one of them. He's got a decent amount of Paul in power, just in a mash is another gentleman that I like to follow quite a bit. But you didn't have anybody before. Ron Paul was the only one before, and everybody, you know,

Starting point is 01:15:04 they didn't really pay much attention to him, called him crazy, you know, crazy or whatever. He's actually my, that's the first guy that I saw. I watched his videos at first, like, man, how many years ago, and that was my kind of introduction into that, so. Yeah, Ron Paul used to be the only Liberty Republican out there,

Starting point is 01:15:20 and now I could, I could rattle off a couple more Thomas Massey and Kentucky is pretty awesome. And they're interesting because they're viewed as Tea Party Republicans. And I was part of the Tea Party movement. Which originally started off very... It was a very liberty thing. And then it got hijacked. It got hijacked. And by the way, politics corrupts everything. So it of course, it would corrupt a social movement as well. But Justin Amash is a ardent defender of free speech and privacy and all the things we've been talking about today.

Starting point is 01:16:00 But and by the way, probably one of the highest-profile Republican critics of Donald Trump, but he was elected by the Tea Party against the Republican establishment in his district. And they actually ran a candidate against him with the most horrible attack ads, and they've tried to unseat him, but he's untouchable because politics has been democratized. He raises money outside of the party system. He organizes his voters outside of the party system. He uses things like Facebook to communicate every vote he takes. He will give you full explanation. Which is great. Like that's precisely who we want to run for office.

Starting point is 01:16:43 But his party boss has hate him But his party boss has hate him. His party boss has hate him. And sometimes he works with Democrats on issues of common interest. As Thomas Massey said once, see someone asked him, why do you work with so many Democrats? And he said, well, Matt, you're confusing me for a partisan.

Starting point is 01:17:04 I'm an ideologue. I believe certain things. And if I can find someone else that believes I was saying, I'm going to work with them. And I don't care which party they belong to. Excellent. Are you like a big L-libitarian or small? Like, are you a big party libertarian?

Starting point is 01:17:19 There's actual political party libertarian. Yeah, I'm a small L-libitarian. And I- There's a difference. Yeah, there is a difference. And political parties are vehicles to try to accomplish some short-term goal. And they can be empty vessels.

Starting point is 01:17:34 Like the Republican Party can be free trade one year and anti-trade the next year, same with the Democratic Party. The first real involvement I had with the big L libertarian party was in this last cycle because I liked Gary Johnson compared to the other two choices we had on the ballot. They are struggling with the growing pains of what it would take to be a major party. And some of that's internal, like they're constantly having fights about who's pure enough

Starting point is 01:18:05 and excommunicating anybody that's not pure enough. Yeah, didn't they say just recently that Ron Paul and Judge Napolotano can't even speak it there? Yeah, I mean, someone in the LP said that and they were debating back and forth, but those are the kinds of little fights that small parties have.

Starting point is 01:18:25 The bigger problem is that the two party do happily, the Republicans and the Democrats, colluded to keep Gary Johnson off the stage during the presidential debates, and based on the standards that Ross Perot used to get on the presidential stage, Gary should have been up there, but they changed the rules because they're a cartel and they can change the rules. And they don't like competition. So a lot of the problems with third parties, not just the libertarian party, is that the two parties don't want them. Green party has the same problem.

Starting point is 01:18:56 But you're seeing all of these dynamics that I described with was Justin Amash beating the party bosses. You're seeing the ability of third parties to use social media to grow their ideas. I think, personally, I think people should have more than two choices in politics. They're gonna have to go that route, or else the rock is gonna be our next president.

Starting point is 01:19:15 I mean, I feel like if they don't get on fucking board with Facebook and start figuring this game out, or destined for a celebrity to be our next fucking president. I don't, yeah. I mean, that's, I'm predicting him right now. Unless somebody else finally gets together. She has a run. Yeah, Oprah or the rock between those two. I'm leanin rock. So for someone who's just wants to start learning more

Starting point is 01:19:39 about some of these ideas, what's what are good resources replaces? You think they should start looking? So a couple of places, I mean, go check out our videos. You find us on Facebook, free the people, find us on YouTube, wait, and we publish all our videos there. We're primarily using Facebook just because that's where we've invested over the years. I like the foundation for economic education, and it's a crowdsourced platform for articles and stories about Liberty. There's a lot of great stuff on there.

Starting point is 01:20:10 I've always loved Reason Magazine, John Stossel's doing some stuff with them right now. And if you want to dig deeper, go look at the curriculum that say the Cato Institute might propose. But I just don't, I don't think you should start with a thousand-page book that I tried to slog through. Start with a video, start with a story.

Starting point is 01:20:36 There's a guy named Glenn Jacobs, who is Cain from WWE. Oh yeah. And he's a libertarian. Yeah. Number 10. Number 10. Yeah, of course, I didn't know that. And we did, we did, I did an interview with him. He is the most articulate explainer of the super intelligent of the

Starting point is 01:20:53 difference between socialism and capitalism. So, so check that out. I mean, maybe a fun interview then. Maybe we should find them. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I liked it. The video I send people, there's one video I send everybody when we start talking about these things. And it's Milton Friedman, the pencil. He's describing it. It's a three minute video you can find on YouTube.

Starting point is 01:21:12 And it's a very basic, but very powerful illustration of- As far as economics. Just the power of markets and how they are drivers for peace. And not what people tend to think when they think chronic capitalism, so my favorite thing to share. Anyway, thanks for coming on, man. That's been fun.

Starting point is 01:21:33 Absolutely, Blas, I'm glad that you're really the first person that we're bringing on the show that we're introducing, like this is one of my passions in particular, is are the philosophies and ideals of liberty and free markets, and you're the first person we brought on to talk about this with our audience, so thanks. Yeah. Thank you.

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