The Breakdown - Against Outrage Culture: Why Michael Krieger Ended Liberty Blitzkrieg

Episode Date: July 11, 2020

Today on the Brief: Hong Kong re-closes schools based on COVID-19 growth Coinbase explores direct U.S. exchange listing China starts selling stock, easing massive rally  Our main conversation is with Liberty Blitzkrieg creator and editor Michael Krieger. Michael announced just before recording that he is done publishing on the LB site. He and NLW discuss: How Michael became disaffected while working on Wall Street during the Great Financial Crisis How Zero Hedge amplified Liberty Blitzkrieg and sent Michael on a decade-long writing path How Michael discovered bitcoin and the bitcoin community in 2012 Why social media platforms need to be regulated with the principles of the First Amendment  How all political parties use division to stay in power  How outrage culture has become endemic, commodified and co-opted by existing power  Why the only option to fight outrage culture is to opt out Find our guest online:Website: libertyblitzkrieg.com Twitter: @LibertyBlitz

If you're not a CNN, you can be memory hold. Your entire history, your entire life's work can be memory hold and disappeared forever. Whereas these other companies can't ever do anything wrong. The same thing applies to, let's say, the people that brought us to the Iraq war based on lies suffered no consequences. And in fact, in a lot of cases, have a higher profile positions of power and authority now than they did before. It's important to understand the average person with no power messes up and you're finished once. The powerful, can start wars and kill millions and be promoted. That's the incentive structure.

Welcome back to the breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, Crypto, and Beyond. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Crypto.com. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. And now, here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to the Breakdown. down. It is Friday, July 10th, and today we have an extremely special episode. My guest, Michael Krieger, is the author of Liberty Blitzkriek, one of the most sort of profound and long-running

blogs about dissent in some ways of the modern monetary system. Yesterday, just before we recorded this podcast, Michael announced that he was going to discontinue writing on Liberty Blitzkriek. It doesn't mean that he'll be gone from writing entirely, but he's moving on to a new domain, a new brand, a new story, and a new emphasis. And this conversation is about why, and it's much bigger than just one person shifting their focus. I think it has a lot to do and a lot to say about the state of outrage culture in America. Before we get into that, however, let's do the brief. First up, on the brief, Hong Kong has closed. its school. So what happened? The Hong Kong Education Bureau announced the suspension of all schools

starting from Monday, and this is because of a local COVID-19 spike that included some parents and students. The closure, I think, reflects the sticky persistence of this virus as even places that did a great job with it are on high alert about letting it creep back in. Why the story matters, of course, is that this persistence of the virus is spooking markets. For months and months, both myself and guests have been saying that the only thing that really matters in the economy in some ways is what happens with the virus. Ryan Selkis from Masari called this the COVID Fear Index,

I thought was a great way to describe it. And we're seeing other impacts in the markets now of the persistence of this virus in the U.S. Treasury yields fell to their lowest levels since the lockdowns began loosening, means, in other words, that people are moving back to safety. So as it's been for months and months now, you simply can't have a conversation about the American economy and the global economy without asking what's happening with COVID-19. Next on the brief, Coinbase is exploring a U.S.

exchange listing. Writers reported yesterday that Coinbase has started the process for a domestic exchange listing. They're looking, it seems, at a direct listing rather than an IPO, but either way, this could come as early as this year or would almost certainly be next year. Why it's significant is a couple of reasons. First, I think that there's probably some relationship to yesterday's brief conversation about the bonanza in corporate equities that we've seen. There's a huge demand to suck up stocks and to sell stocks to build resilience, and this could be part of that. But it's also significant because this would make Coinbase the first crypto exchange to go public in the U.S. So just another milestone in the maturial.

of the crypto industry. Third and finally on the brief China selling off. For the last eight days, Chinese stocks have been on an absolute tear, and if you'll remember from a few days ago, this was driven in large part by Chinese state media saying, hey, you all should get into stocks and retail responding. Well, Chinese state funds have now started selling stocks. And this is a sign to Chinese investors that the game may be coming to an end, at least right now. Now, even when we were talking about this a few days ago, people were worried that this sort of state prompting of people to get into the stock market might create a bubble like we saw in 2014, 2015 in China that had some really painful fallout on the other side.

Chinese stocks have added a trillion dollars in value this week over this huge eight-day surge up to a total of $9.5 trillion. Why this matters is two parts. The first is that part of the rally earlier in the week in global equities was driven in part by this Chinese rally, right? It was extended elsewhere. It showed confidence. It just gave markets more faith that things might be turning around or getting better. It was also something that we talked about in the context of the potential spillover implications

for the cryptocurrency industry. If Chinese investors are really successful, they might move some of their funds to those areas in crypto instead. The bigger thing, though, for me is that this is just one more demonstration of how fun fundamentally unfree markets are everywhere, right? You had Ray Dalio a couple weeks ago telling the U.S. that he didn't believe that U.S. markets were free anymore because of the way that the Fed intervenes with monetary policy, but this is an even more aggressive intervention in some ways because you have so much control over key pieces of the financial apparatus in China.

And that theme of state control over the economy and its implications is a perfect segue to our main conversation. Michael Krieger is the author of Liberty Blitzkrieg. He spent a decade on Wall Street and watching the failure of that system around the great financial crisis prompted him to make a major change. He started writing about what he saw as the corruption and fundamental failings of the system that he had been a part in, and those writing started to get picked up by zero hedge. This turned into a pretty prolific writing career that was sort of the red pill for a pretty big number of folks if you go out and ask them. Michael got into Bitcoin really early and found a lot of refuge in that community and the way that that community looked at the world. And this is a pretty

special conversation because just yesterday before we recorded, Michael announced to the world that this would be his last post as Liberty Blitzkrieg. We go deep into why it was the right time for him to move to a different type of voice and a different type of writing. But the central piece of this has to do with outrage culture and the just the sweeping politicization of outrage and the manipulation of outrage that has become so endemic in our society. And the question that will underpin this conversation and really kind of what Michael does next is, I think, can you fight outrage culture with more outrage, or do you simply have to opt out? So with that, let's dive into this interview. As always, it's been edited only really lightly, and I hope you enjoy it.

All right, Michael, thank you so much for joining on what is a kind of a big day for you. Yep, Nathaniel, it is. It's completely coincidental, too. You know, it's interesting, because we put this date on the calendar, I think, almost a while ago, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I wasn't even planning on retiring Liberty Blitzkrieg at all this week. It was a last-minute decision. It was in the, you know, it was in the back of my head as something that I knew was coming, but I didn't know when. And then finally, you know, as I was thinking about, well, what do I want to post about this week? You know, there were all sorts of topics I could post about that I know would have been popular and I probably could have done a good job about it, you know, related to current events and what's

happening and the craziness and all that. But I, when it came down to, sitting down to write about it, I didn't want to do it. I just didn't want to write it. And I felt like that was a sign that it's, that this is done, I'm done, you know, that for now with this kind of content on this particular medium, that chapter of my life is over. And, you know, as we've discussed off, offline here, you know, there's, there's a new website that will be coming, probably this fall. And it's going to be much more expansive. It's going to be different, different topics. I've written philosophically many times on my site, and I naturally like doing that. So there'll be more of that and there'll be more gardening and there'll be more parenting and there'll be

probably more about books and trying to tie all that stuff into the long game that we're going to have to play. You know, we're not going to change, you know, it's pretty obvious now. We're not going to change this thing in a quick, easy manner. It's going to probably take a very long time to truly turn around civilization. But I'm going to provide some more different perspectives on that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's a crazy day. But I'm very happy to be taking some time to reflect and get started on this next project. Well, so that's a hell of a thesis statement and a kind of a TLDR that I want to bring our listeners up to.

And since this conversation is both an end and a beginning in some ways, you know, you just today published what you have said might be your last ever post on Liberty Blitzker. 325 pages of posts. I was just reviewing. I went back to the first one that I could click on, which is just an insane amount of content spread over a decade, right? And so I thought that the only fitting place to start was how this began. I mean, it's interesting because this is, I think, a quintessentially internet-era content project in that it was something that it seems to me, and it feels to me from, you know, hearing you talk on other podcasts, other shows as well, that this is something you really had to do. You needed an outlet to talk about something that was so big.

So let's talk about how this began. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned on my pages. I didn't even know that. So thanks for letting me know. I'm really bad at stuff like that. I mean, I think one of the things I might do in this time off is try to archive a little bit, put put in some sort of organized manner so people can go back and look.

So where did this all start? You know, I'm not going to go into the Wall Street, you know, stuff unless you want to later, you know, 10 years on Wall Street. I've discussed that, you know, many times on different podcasts before. But for me, I was lucky in the sense that I was at a young age, I was making, I was very successful, you know, on Wall Street. I was doing very well in my career. I left, you know, at the top of my career, essentially, making a lot of money, young age, full of my, full of ego, full of myself. You know, I was pretty ugly person in a lot of ways, actually, if I look back upon it. it. And the crisis was kind of a gift to me. It was a gift and a curse, but it was a gift in the

sense that it kind of knocked my ego down on the floor. Because when I saw the way that the federal, you know, the central banks and government were rushing to protect my industry, right? The industry that needed to be protected and coddled and saved financially the least, right? People making all this money for really no good reason. But let's be honest, you're not really adding much to society. You know, that sort of hit my ego because I realized, you know what? Sure, I'm good at this job. But the reason I'm making all this money is because the system is designed to enrich people

that happen to be sitting in this seat. It's not that I'm so special. It's that I'm a smart guy, right, who's sitting in a particular seat in a particular industry that's favored, you know, by empire, by oligarchy. And so that actually freed me in a way because, you know, I felt like, okay, well, know I can make money. You know, I know I can make money on Wall Street, you know, so it kind of lost the challenge at that point to me. It felt like, okay, I did that. You know, what's what, what, what, what are my next five years going to look like? Yeah, I'll be making a lot of money and I'll be here in

New York and I'll be, you know, probably wanting to kill myself in five or 10 years, because I'm still doing the same thing and still with work. And so, uh, it allowed me to, you know, contemplate and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, leave, you know, leave, you know, leave Wall Street and quit. And I didn't know what I was going to do at all. I really had no clue. I was going to, I thought about a family office, you know, so I did start managing some of my own capital, which, you know, was okay, amount, but not a ton. And I kept writing, though. Okay.

And so that's how I ended up with Liberty Blitzkrieg. So when I was at Sanford Bernstein on Wall Street, one of my primary roles was just to write pieces, right, macro pieces. I was a commodities analyst on the trading desk. So that gave me this sort of wide range to. comment on all sorts of stuff because, you know, commodities is such a geopolitical and macro industry that you're thinking about regions all over the world. You're thinking about currency. You're thinking about all these things. So, you know, I would write macro pieces. And they were very popular, you know, around the street, biggest, biggest hedge funds, asset managers, they all read it.

And so I figured, you know, when I stopped, I figured I figured I'll keep writing. You know, I'll just, what I'll do is I'll take my email list because I had, you know, I had some contacts. and I, you know, found out who wanted to keep hearing from me and I kept writing. Somehow that ended up on Zero Hedge one day in early 2010. And that was sort of the beginning of my public writing because then Zero Hedge started publishing my articles frequently, pretty much every one of them. You know, Max Kaiser discovered me through that. We hooked up for an interview. And then I figured, okay, you know, this is sort of where the ball is going for me.

You know, this is sort of where fate and destiny seems to be pushing me. So let me continue along that path. So from that point on, you know, I really just kept writing email blasts and they kept getting on Zero Hedge and I figured that was enough. You know, I didn't necessarily feel like I needed my own real estate on the internet until around sometime in 2012. I can't remember the exact, no, was it, yeah, I think it was early 2012, actually. It's interesting.

That's the same year I got into Bitcoin. But so in early 2012, I launched my own. Liberty Blitzkrieg. It was really just a play on my name. You know, Krieger is my last name, which actually literally translates to Warrior in German. And Krieg means war. So it's lightning war, basically, Liberty Lightning War. So, you know, some people actually don't like that name very much, but it's just a play on my name. So in any event, so that's when I started writing the website. And, you know, if you do, if somebody does look back at my post, it's changed a lot over that time. You know, in the beginning, I was, I was posting every day, like two or three or

four times a day, right? It was sort of my first experience with the website. And so I really very much fell into a little bit of clickbait chasing, right? You know, I like to see how many hits I could get or how many people would be reading my stuff. I got this dopamine hit from it. And, you know, I proceeded along that way for a few years, probably until 2017, roughly, with that sort of post- thing multiple times every day, going for that dopamine hit. I had ads on my site, you know, like Google ads, I had all sorts of ads. I was trying a lot of different things. And then around 2017, I started getting into this topic, which I don't know if you've read my post on it, but it really was, this was the prior seminal moment to this one in my life when I came

across this thing called Spiral Dynamics, which I wrote a five-part series on. And if you haven't checked it out, it'd be worth it. It's, the spiral dynamics is essentially a theory on the evolution of consciousness and that there are different levels of consciousness that humans can experience. And you can go back, you know, you can go up and down, depending on circumstances or a variety of things. But essentially, some of the science behind this talks about a second tier consciousness where, you know, essentially humans fundamentally change in a very profound way. Anyway, reading about all this really provided a fundamental framework for what I was seeing and even reflecting on my own behavior, questioning myself, questioning what I was doing, how I was doing it,

what my priorities were, and trying to essentially strive to be the more, you know, to emphasize the more conscious aspect of who I am. So around that time, I, you know, I removed ads from the site. I went away from, you know, a lot of posts every day and clickbait and all that stuff. And then really started writing once a week. And so anyway, my work has evolved even within Liberty Blitzkrieg. But I feel now that I need an actual new space that more reflects the person that I am, the kind of lifestyle that I'm living now, the priorities I have, and also the kind of message that I want to convey going forward.

Yeah. There's so much that I want to explore because, you know, as I was mentioning, I think there's a lot in this last post in particular that is super poignant in the context of kind of the moment that we're living through. But keeping with this kind of bringing you up through the history, I know that a lot of people will be really interested in how you found your way to Bitcoin and where that fit with kind of the emerging consciousness you had at that time. Right. So I often say that, you know, it was 2012 that I first got some. Bitcoin started accepting it, donations on my website, and wrote my first post on it. So my first post on Bitcoin publicly was, I think it was August 2012. It wasn't August, it was September.

And it was about the WikiLeaks blockade that the banks and PayPal had, you know, basically were trying to cut off funding, donation funding for WikiLeaks. And I read about how WikiLeaks was going around that by accepting Bitcoin donations. And Bitcoin is, I first heard of Bitcoin reading a, I believe it was in, you see the new, I think it was the New Yorker, actually, in 20. 11. That was the first time I read it. And I remember when I read it, I was like, whoa, this is interesting, but I have no technology skills, right, or knowledge or understanding. So I couldn't tell, I couldn't make any sense of what was what it was. And I didn't get into it. But I was like,

oh, this is interesting, but I have, I cannot, you know, I cannot reasonably conclude whether it's a fraud or a real or anything. So I put it on the back burner, but didn't forget about it. But once I saw a real world application, once I saw WikiLeaks, you know, which I had been following for many years and writing about surviving essentially through Bitcoin, that's when I knew, okay, well, this is having a tangible impact on the world right now. It's allowing speech. It's allowing journalism to continue in the face of threats by financial institutions. And that's when I realized, okay, this is something big. And at that point, I pulled aside my smart. artist technology friend. And I said, okay, let's sit down. Let's have a beer. You tell me all you

know about Bitcoin and answer all my questions. And he did that. And after that, I felt, okay, you know, this is the real deal. I'm going to dive right in. And that's how I came to Bitcoin. Now, you know, as I said to you before we started recording, a lot of people come to sort of how messed up our financial system is, our monetary system, and essentially the world, by first jumping into Bitcoin and then exploring the other things. You know, I came at it a different way because I had already already known and already had been writing about for years how shady and criminal our monetary and financial system is. And so when Bitcoin came around, it was sort of to me like, you know, Christmas morning,

you know, oh, this is what I've been waiting for. You know, wow, you know, I can't believe it. I couldn't sleep for days after I, you know, you know, I'm sure anyone that's in Bitcoin knows what I'm talking about when I say the light bulb moment. You know, that moment where it all clicks for you and you see the potency and revolutionary power of it for the first time. You know, when that happened to me, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't talk about anything else.

Everyone that I would listen to me, I would tell about Bitcoin. A very small amount of people did listen to me. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't think about anything else. But I was very happy because prior to that, I didn't see a way out. that was productive. I thought, okay, well, what are we going to do next? What are you just going to go back to a gold standard?

Is it just going to collapse? Like, what are people going to use to transact that's outside of the system, outside of the state if the monetary system fails, et cetera, et cetera. But when Bitcoin was around, I said, okay, well, we have this now. You know, we have it. We essentially have a lifeboat, and we have an alternative. And so, yeah, it was a profound moment. You know, again, this was a profound moment in my life.

I think, you know, there are a few times maybe once every 10 years that something comes along and just like blasts my brain into the stratosphere. And Bitcoin was that for me over the last 10 years. And, you know, I wrote a lot about Bitcoin for a while. You know, I went to some conferences. You know, I was pretty early on in the whole thing. And then, you know, and now it's just this huge ecosystem and community of smart, talented, decent people who are trying to push it forward. And I don't, I'm not in it all day at all anymore.

You know, I don't pay that close attention. But I don't feel like I have to. You know, there's so many people doing it better than I could anyways. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred exchange for serious traders and investors, trusted by over 4 million customers, including top financial institutions. BitStamp is built on professional-grade trading. technology. Their platform is powered by a NASDAQ matching engine, and their APIs are recognized as the best

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you can get up to 20% back. Download the crypto.com app today and enjoy these offers until the end of September. It's hard to explain unless someone has really sat back and thought of it, just how historically anomalous, I mean, unique really, the idea of a non-sovereign non-state money is, like a legitimate money system that operates outside of the framework of any one state. I mean, even, you know, you do have gold and precious metals and commodities that are not, their value isn't given or determined by the state, but they're part

of a state ecosystem, right? And the idea that something is truly outside that is pretty profound, especially for folks who, I mean, it's almost so profound that it's hard for people to wrap their heads around it first. So I imagine, I mean, I'm interested also in kind of, you know, you were talking in 2010, 2011, 2012 about a lot of the themes that have become, let's say the Overton window on them has shifted pretty dramatically over the last couple years, right? There's more mainstream discussion of them, particularly with regard to the Fed, to central banks, to the monetary policy that we have perpetuating wealth inequality. Was it like, I mean, Well, one, I guess the question is, was it like screaming alone on an island when you started?

And two, was, I mean, it must have been that that Bitcoin community was probably something of a refuge. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's a great question. And I actually don't like to think back too much on like the 20. I won't drag you too much through it. No, no, no. It's fine because, you know, you move on. And everybody really that sort of believed in the system.

let's say and was good at it. You know, I was good at the system, right? I was a beneficiary of it. And then, and then has that reckoning where they realize, wait a minute, you know, this, it's not good. You know, there's a lot here that that I didn't look into because I was beneficiary of it. And that, you know, so that happened to me, right? Let's say the 20, let's say 2009, 2009, 2012 before getting into Bitcoin period. It was almost like a two or two to three year period where I felt so alone, exactly. I felt as if nobody understood, nobody wanted to hear it, nobody cared, but it was so important and I was so sure that this was crucial information, right? Because I had that history in finance. I knew, you know, I had, I knew what I was talking about. But it was

very, yes, it was very isolating. And it was also, you know, I was one of those guys that you'd go out, you know, I'd have a beer at a bar or drink at a bar with people and I'd just start talking about this stuff. And people were just like, yes, shut out. You know, just. I don't want to hear it. Nobody wanted to hear it. And so, yeah, absolutely. And not only that, right, pre-Bitcoin, not only were very few people aware discussing it. It wasn't at the forefront of anyone's mind, central banking. It just was such a small community of people. And the people that were talking about it were basically the same people that had been talking about it since the 1970s and 80s, you know, like old people that have been talking about gold for 30 years. So it was, yes, it was a very, it was a very isolating time was just a lot of gold people. And, you know, some of those people were great and some of them are not so great. But, but, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't a fun. It wasn't a fun crew. It wasn't a fun necessarily existence. But so when Bitcoin came around, yeah, exactly. I mean, I just, the world seemed like it could be brighter again. And it was absolutely a refuge. And it was so much fun to dive into.

And I knew, you know, what also was encouraging about it to me was the fact that I knew, you know, Bitcoin had been in development, right? I mean, it didn't just spring out of nowhere. You know, Satoshi had been working on it, had built on other work that had been done previously. It made me feel encouraged also because, you know, I know that even though when things seem dark like they did at that 2009, 2010, 2011, and they do again now, by the way, you know, I think, there's probably someone working on something in the background. There's something being tinkered with and that can come out and really change the world. And technology has always been a huge instrument for changing the world, whether it's the printing press or the wheel or Bitcoin, you know, the internet.

And so it gave me that optimism, you know, that things can change faster than you think. Stuff can emerge that you couldn't even conceive of before. And so, yeah, it was, you know, I found also when I went to my first Bitcoin conference, it was I think it was a, was it was a coin. No, it wasn't quite. It was something else. Gosh, I can't even remember now who it was. But it was in 2013, I think. And, you know, listening to the speakers and engaging with the people that were there, I was so much different than a gold conference, you know, which I had gone through also. It was just, it was a younger crowd. It was a more energetic crowd. It was different. It felt optimistic. And I really was attracted to that. And so, yeah, it was a, it was a big change for me. And I'd been, you know, sort of, it was sort of, it was sort of. of just came out of nowhere to get me out of my, let's say, whole that I was in. Yeah, I mean, listen, I think the great paradox of the modern age is the Internet's power to allow people to discover one another in communities that otherwise would have been extremely isolated and isolating, while also then flipside is it can often turn them into

antagonistic tribal forces against one another, you know. But it is a powerful force for helping kind of the aisle of misfit toys come together and actually exert energy and force upon the world, which I think can often be a really positive thing. But I want to ask kind of, you know, as you reflect on Liberty Blitz-Cree, and, you know, part of the reason to kind of hang up the saddle right now is that you've come back to the same themes over and over, right? You were kind of a canary and a coal mine that just kept squawking, right? And, you know, there are far more people who, who I think are getting the message today, but you found yourself kind of having to come back to the same themes because it's still too few, I think, and we can probably agree on that.

But when you think, when people think about Liberty Blitz-Crieg and the output that you've had over the last, you know, decade, what are kind of maybe the three big ideas, or it doesn't have to be three, it's totally arbitrary, but recurring themes that you think people would most associate with you and with the blog? Sure, yeah. I mean, there are a few, you know, I've had,

several core issues to my writing. I'll probably name four, and they're interlocking, of course, you know, and interleaders. You know, and they remain core issues. I mean, and that's part of the frustration Nathaniel is because, right, I mean, these four issues that I consider existential, right? Truly fundamental to a better civilization, I'm still writing about them. And it's gotten worse on almost all of them. Actually, I would say all of them. it's gotten, it's getting worse. It's gotten worse despite, right, despite all of my efforts. And that's okay, but it does just get tiresome at some point. Because, you know, if I've explained my views on central banking, you know, 17 times, why do I want to do it again? Do I want to do it again? Do I want to

write that post again? I don't want to write that post again, you know. So some of the core issues. First, civil liberties. Okay. So within that, we can, we can focus on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights of the United States, something that I, you know, profoundly think were genius concepts for us. In particular, in the beginning of my writing, the Fourth Amendment was a big concern and continues to be, of course, which is privacy, search and seizure. And the way that our government was intentionally spying on us. And before Snowden came out, I was writing about that, right? Because it was pretty obvious it was happening.

And then when Snowden came out, people just had to kind of admit it. But, you know, that was an early theme for me. You know, free speech, right to protest. That's obviously, you know, it's the most important of all of our civil liberties. And now you see that one being increasingly under fire and under attack, which is very depressing and concerning. And, you know, you've seen that, you're seeing that happen in a lot of ways. Of course, the social media giants was very duplicitous what they did. I'm not saying it was originally planned this way, but for let's say Twitter to emerge and say, you know, this is a platform for everyone essentially to speak and then to just narrow that. Like you said, the Overton window to just over time, just narrow and narrow and narrow who can speak and what they can say and all this stuff. After everyone joined, you know, after the whole world built their platforms there, I think is deeply, deeply unethical. And you see that though in YouTube, Google, Facebook, it's happening to all of them.

You know, and it's a very huge problem. So, you know, civil liberties is core to me. Just one of the things that made the country, you know, a beacon, right, for so many decades. The other would be, you know, financial feudalism, which I've written about, you know, the debt feudalism, how debt is used as a weapon against people with no resources and is used, right, against them with no resource and then used as an offensive weapon by people that do have a lot of money. like financial oligarchs and hedge fund managers, etc. Into that goes central banking, of course. I mean, I don't need to review why that's important. But, you know, of course, you know, so central banking, economic, essentially the rigged economic system and central banking, civil liberties.

The other would be empire and endless war, militarism. You know, this is one that goes back to the very beginning for me because I found and still find that a lot of American, are quite ignorant as far as what their country actually is. You know, there's the stuff you learn in the school books, and then there's the reality. And the reality is that the U.S. is a global hegemon, it has been, global empire. And what I try to do for people is not just say, okay, well, first of all, is empire ethical? Is the U.S. empire ethical? Or is it ever ethical, right?

But beyond that, I like to argue, and I do argue all the time, that empire. hire is pernicious and negative force for the, for the average person. Okay. So there's a small segment of people that benefit from, you know, the, the plundering overseas, okay, whether it's defense contractors or Wall Street. You know, there are, there's a small group of people that are fantastically rich and powerful because of that, right? The people that essentially make the decisions that matter in this country.

Everyone else, though, it's bad for. You know, it's what's led to offshoring. It's what's led to spending trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while our own infrastructure fails at home. It's what the dollar, right, you know, I think the USD reserve currency is a huge albatross around the neck of the middle class in this country precisely because it allows, you know, us to be lazy. You know, we can just print the world's money and get resources and essentially not

have to have a functioning economy because we are the reserve currency. So empire in geopolitics and how it hurts the average American, including played a huge role in decimating the middle class, has been another core issue of mine. And then, you know, Bitcoin, of course, has been important to me, things like that. I've written a lot about how Bitcoin is, you know, sort of a teacher. It's not just the end all, be all. There's all sorts of lessons from it. So, for example, you know, when it comes to social media or speech platforms, the Bitcoin model is the one that makes sense, right? It's this permissionless, just like you can send Bitcoin permissionlessly from one address to another. You should be able to speak, you know, permissionlessly on a platform.

And I don't know how we're going to get there, though. That's a real problem. See, I think the value of Twitter is that it did have this huge, diverse group of people globally talking. And, you know, And by eliminating certain types of people or coming from a certain way or even people that talk in a kind of language that the executives that Twitter don't like, you're reducing the actual value of the conversation and you're going to end up siloing people. And I think that's actually going to be pretty dangerous. So let's hang on that point for just a minute because I think it's so important now because I don't know that, and you are kind of just saying this as well. I don't know exactly what the answer is, and it seems to me that part, let me put it differently. I don't know what the answer is outside executives who decide that they're not willing to, like, it's still almost a centralized mandate for openness, right?

That could be overturned through, let's say that let's put it a different way. If Jack Dorsey decided that he was going to allow everything to go, right, it was going to be governed like Bitcoin, which is a system he obviously likes, then all of a sudden, uh, Carl, icon or someone comes in and says they don't like that and they kick Dorsey out and they impose all these new restrictions because they can't get advertisers to buy into something that's not a safe space, right? That is a possibility anytime you have a centralized platform. The problem, it seems in some ways, is that these companies that have grown to a size and a scale and an influence and an importance in our world, in our culture and our society that is totally

unparalleled to companies from even a generation ago. I mean, in some ways, they're more like public utilities, but they're not. They're still private companies. And I don't know how to reconcile those two facts. Yeah. So, okay, well, that was an interesting point. So Nathaniel, so as an energy analyst, I did a little bit on utilities, right? You mentioned utility.

Utilities are private companies, okay? I mean, they trade on stock exchanges. I mean, most of them, right? They pay dividends. They have profit and loss, but they're highly regulated. because of because of the fact that they're utilities. They deliver electricity and gas to people. And you can you and you need to have, you should have.

And I agree with having stringent regulation there. So I agree with your point. Except for the fact that I don't think being a private corporation means that they, they always, and in every instance, should to just have this like free reign, particularly if that, right, if that company is providing a public service that is, as you mentioned, gets to a certain level of dominance and is in the public interest. And so I am sympathetic to what you say, and I agree with it. I think that if it were me, I think that social media, because we're in this new world,

where that's the public square, that's the internet's public square. You can't deny it. And companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have achieved a certain level of dominance within that space. And again, if you're going to have a public source. square, let's say for micro blogging, like what Twitter is. I think winner takes all is a good thing, as I mentioned earlier, because of the fact that you do want people challenging each other that don't agree with each. If you just have a MAGA, right, Twitter, and then you have a...

I mean, have you messed around with all, like, all of these ones that, like, I totally understand where they're coming from who are trying to kind of be a censorship-resistant new Twitter, but they end up just being a clubhouse for people who are kicked out. which doesn't solve any of the problems when you zoom up a level, right? Exactly. No, exactly. I haven't played around with it because that was my assumption. Yeah.

It's a correct assumption. Right. So it's a problem. So, okay, so first we have to say, do we, is there value, let's just take micro blogging, right? Because me and you are both active on Twitter. Is there a value to having a dominant micro blogging platform where basically everyone wants to be on or most people are on with completely, diverse viewpoints and talking about totally random things about, right? Is that valuable to society? Is it something we want? Okay. For me, I would say absolutely. You know, I think that's, that's a huge part of, um,

of, of, you know, allowing the best, the best sort of ideas or bad ideas to be challenged, um, you know, sorting things out. I think over time, right, there's ugliness to it. There's stupidity. There's dangerous stuff to it too. But over time, yeah, I think that's, that's what we want. Okay. We don't want siloed different, a million different social media platforms. At least I don't. So if we do want that, then we're accepting monopoly, more or less, right? We're accepting. that there's going to be a dominant player, they're going to have some sort of a monopoly. Okay. So if we accept that and we allow that player to be a private company, which I'm okay with,

okay, I'm okay with it, that company, whatever it is, and in this case, it is Twitter, in my view, should be heavily regulated. But not in a way, but again, you can, a lot of people probably listening to this will hear regulation. Like, I hate regulation. Regulation is always terrible. Of course it's not always terrible, right? I mean, if it's done properly and actually in the interests of the public, it isn't tyranny.

It isn't, right? It isn't communism. And the example is clear. So is Twitter more free for, let's say, the United States? Is Twitter a more free platform? Is it a more liberating platform? Is it a better platform if it is regulated to follow the First Amendment? Right.

Like, First Amendment law remains very good. Okay. There's no First Amendment law on the Internet. I mean, on these platforms. But in practice, we still have that on the books. So that is an extraordinarily liberty-minded thing, the latitude to which we have free speech in this country. And so applying that to Twitter, how is that, I mean, to make the argument that that is somehow tyrannical or too much government, for the government to say, no, no, we want the most free speech possible. in accordance with U.S. law and constitution applied to the monopoly platform for micro blogging,

I think that's completely reasonable. And in fact, I think it should be done. Because I think outside of like a totally decentralized solution, which we still haven't seen. And also, by the way, you get into problems with that too, because there are things that are illegal and should be illegal that you don't want, you know, going on on, you know, let's say, you know, child pornography or things like that. You don't want. Right. There's stuff that's not protected by free speech, right? Exactly. But right, if it's totally decentralized, how do you, right? How do you manage that? Who manages it, et cetera? So I think, I think that, I think the option is staring us right in the face. And I'm, and I'm annoyed with Dorsey and his team because it was such an obvious thing to do and he should have done it, right?

If he had just said, I'm an American, I'm running an American company based in San Francisco. I'm a believer in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and I have faith in the laws that govern free speech in this country, in which my company is based. I am going to apply First Amendment law to the platform. If it's legal, it stays. If it's illegal, it's not. You have block functions.

You have mute functions. You also have our tyrannical algorithm, which is going to sort out a lot of this for most people, right? Right. So that's what he should have done. I mean, now he's dug in too much and stuff, but I don't think it's going to happen. But think about how easy that would have been. The headache is over at that point.

Okay. You know what I mean? Your terms and conditions are First Amendment. That's it. Yeah. So it's interesting. I could think a couple things that are interesting about it. One is I think that there's a lot of rich discussion to be had that really isn't had around

how ideas of natural monopoly apply to tech network effects. And I think they're going to be really important because it's key. cute that we spend so much time on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and content moderation when Amazon is just eating the entire economy, full sale, right? And is literally replacing systematically every brand that's not an Amazon brand with a different named Amazon brand. When you talk about like the power of a company on our future and on our destiny, Amazon continuously ranks as the highest trusted and all these sort of things and all this attention is on Zuckerberg and Facebook or whatever. Well, again, Bezos is just slowly.

eating the whole economy. And so we're going to have to have the conversation about natural monopolies at some point because they're exerting their will on us, whether we like it or not. So I think that that's a really good point or a salient point that you make, that there is parallels in terms of utilities and how you navigate a public, private kind of thing. I think that the second part, which gets me to another discussion that I wanted to have with you, is the problem of the problem that when we have conversations that don't fit, it comfortably into one of the highly calcified party lines of the two mainstream parties in the American system.

And the reason that I bring it up in this case, and you even kind of intimated this as you were talking about it, some people are going to hear regulation. You have in America, the right which has systematically gutted, hold aside even policy, the narrative that government has any role to play in regulating companies. And now that there's time and they need, and they're now the ones who are talking about sort of implementing free speech, it rings so hypocritical. But then on the other hand, you have the left, which is kind of on a completely different tip as it relates to what it looks like to actually regulate things. And all you have is, you know, kind of Warren's plan to break big

companies up and stuff, right? So you don't have, it's not like they're offering some clear alternative. And so what's left with is you're basically here trying to kind of paint some common sense point that doesn't really have a home anymore in the American political landscape. And this gets me to the question that I wanted to ask. Part of what I think is so interesting and so appealing about your writing to so many people is that it is almost like existentially unable to tow any party line other than what makes sense through thoughtful consideration, right? And sometimes that's going to fit into one of a bunch of different political perspectives.

But that's really difficult in today's environment, particularly in the context of social media. Yeah, it's, I mean, you summed it up perfectly. And this is what I try to, you know, the point I try to get across to people. I mean, look, we are naturally tribal, right? I mean, it's sort of evolution early. There's that enough. And so I think that's used by power and by political parties to, they know that, right? There is a, oh, by the way, I'm going on a tangent a little here.

But if you've never read. Tangents. Do it. You've never read Brave New World Revisited, right? Not Brave New World, which is a great book. But I'm saying Brave New World Revisited, which was written several, you know, I think maybe 20 years later by Huxley. It is so good. go go get it and read it right away and the reason i say that is because what he does is he

systematically goes into the propaganda techniques from 60 years ago right that they had then okay what they were using what they knew about human nature right where corporations knew what the bureaucracy knew what the national security state undoubtedly knew right not just in the u.s but globally all these countries knew and it just it shows you that if they knew that if they were at that level of manipulation and understanding of the human psyche back then, believe me, they're like a hundred times more advanced now and they have more technology now. So what happens is, you know, and this is the problem we have, humans have, they're wired in a certain way, right? I mean, I do think I'm wired a little bit differently for whatever reason, but I still have,

you know, a lot of those traits as well in me. I'm just more aware of them. Buttons that can be pushed, right? Emotions that can be inflamed, you know, the tribalism, that I mentioned before that's sort of inherently there from evolution. These buttons are just constantly pushed. I see it every single day with how narratives are constructed and then people are easily siloed into their little boxes again. So that's what's going on. And the problem is I can be out there writing and explaining,

wait a minute, think this through. Don't be so great. Don't be so crazy. Don't be so partisan. Like what do you, but it doesn't matter because because if people are sort of easily programmed, if someone is easily programmed, they're easily programmed. And I think that a lot of people are simply easily programmed or programmed already.

And so all that needs to be done is you got to push a button here, you got to push a button there. And you can sort of make masses of people act in a certain way. And that certain way is not to benefit the masses. It's to benefit the rulers. And so that's, where we're at, you know. And so, yes, that's why what I'd like to say to people, you know, I've never been a partisan person with politics. You know, I've never, you know, never made sense

to me to be, you know, the political parties or anything. But I didn't really know why until I got older and started thinking about it and understanding the issues. So that's why I always focus on the issues. And when I say to people is have principles, not political parties. Okay. So if you, if there are certain things, take the big subjects, right, civil liberties. Okay, where do you stand? Why do you stand there? You don't have to agree with me, but you should be able to explain in a minute where you stand on civil liberties and why. Okay. The same thing should be with empire. You know, where do you stand on empire? You know, is it a good thing? Why is it a good thing? Do you support it? Should we be spending trillions overseas instead of trillions at home, you know, when the middle class has just been eviscerated? You know, that's how we should be having that discussion. But instead it becomes purely partisan, right? Everything becomes, you know, this guy. who, you know, I like on television or with a blue checkmark near his name is getting me all ramped up about this. So I'm going to hate that person and this party and I'm going to like, so that's the problem. And so I guess my advice and, you know, your listeners, I'm sure, don't need to hear this, right?

Because, and that's part of the problem, right? It's me and you talking to each other here. You know, we kind of get it. You know, and your listeners are probably going to get it too. But, you know, how do we reach the others? You know, that's the harder part. And that's sort of why I'm hanging up Liberty Blitzkrieg and trying a different approach. because maybe I can reach other people through gardening.

You know, maybe I can reach other people through parenting. I don't know. But it's something I think about a lot. But the key thing is this, listen, being part of a political party or being attached to a political party or believing in a political party makes you brain dead, makes you completely brain dead. The same thing happens for politicians. Attaching yourself to a politician makes you brain dead. It causes you to stop thinking.

Because if you've decided this political party is good or this person is good, right? This is my savior. Then even when they do stuff that conflicts with your principles, you're going to make excuses for it. I mean, and this is where like the whole like, let's say QAnon, right, works with some people. It's because whenever Trump does something that is counter to what he ran on, and by the way, on all the big issues, he pretty much does things that are counter to what he ran on, you know, Q comes in. and says it's the plan, right? It's just part of the plan. I remember they told me when I said, he just appointed John Bolton, one of the craziest neocons ever. Like, totally wadding. Frothing maniac

of the highest degree. The guy hired him to be his national security advisor. I'm like, and you know what people told me? They said, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right? Like, as if it was this master plan, right, to get Bolton under control. And guess what? Now look at it. Did that, was that really what happened? Of course not. So, so this is your problem. The, the, or this is the problem for a lot of people is once you've gone in, right? Once you've decided, this party is good, this person is good. You stop thinking, right? So my suggestion should be, and I, and by the way, I've seen this happen to very smart people. I know, it's not just, it's not just morons, you know, this can happen to anybody because it's human nature. It's part of your ego. The moment that you've decided,

I'm in on this, right? You've, let's say, publicly. stated. I'm for Trump, right? I believe in Trump. He's good. Now how hard it is to walk that back, it's very hard. Most people can't do it. And so you will make excuses for the person. It's sort of like, and this is one of the lessons I've learned being on Wall Street and investing. You know, it's like what they say, cut your losses, you know, because you cut and you got to just sort of do that in life in general. And gardening, you know, taught me the same thing. I just had to cut my losses on a tomato plan, right? Something that I had grown since April from a little baby's seed. You know, it's in the, it's in the garden. I see there's a disease. It hurt, it hurt, but I had to

tear it out, you know, and that's part of life. And so for me, you got to focus on principles. And so I would ask everybody to say, okay, what are my principles? Okay, so the first thing you should do is sit down and on a piece of paper say, what are my five biggest issues? Now, what do I care about the most? Because not everyone has to care about empire and central banking like I do, but I care about it and I try to get other people to care about it, but you don't have to care about it, but what do you care about? Okay, what are the top five things you care about? Okay, what's your position on those five things? Okay, great. So then if there's a politician that is checking some of those boxes and actually doing good work on them, you can say, good, I support

your action on those issues. And when they deviate from it, you say, I don't support your action on those issues. You don't need to support a person. You should support policy and principles. and the world would be a lot saner place if we did that. It's interesting. There's almost two things underlying this. One is a conversation we don't have, which is exactly your point, which is kind of digging a layer underneath and asking, like, what policies make this party or this person deserve my affiliation, right?

Where do they relate to me, not the other way around? How do I fit them into the box of what is expected of this party affiliation? But then the second is, I think, even more pernicious in some ways, which is that we don't reward the wisdom that comes from having been wrong, learning more, and founding out and making better decisions or having better opinions in the future. In fact, what we're doing is the exact opposite, which is punishing you for being wrong ever, right? And hyper-magnifying that wrongness. And so to your point, I think that creates an incentive to just utterly double down on even the most absurd takes that don't reflect. who you are, you know, which is a really damaging thing. It's interesting you bring that up because it sort of goes to, I wrote about once how

Twitter and social media is creating a caste system. And I talked about how there's nothing CNN could do to get banned. Nothing. They could do, they could do like the worst thing you could possibly imagine to someone publicly, like the institution, the heads of it, everything. And that company will never be banned, never, no matter what. and somebody like us, we make one mistake and we could be banned for life. Our entire years of content memory hold forever, right?

It happened to Zero Hedge for a while. I mean, it was so unethical, right? Zero Hedge had whether you like them or not, whether you think, right, their Twitter is good or not, it doesn't matter. That was history, right? You know, you like history, right? Zero Hedges tweets, right? A hundred, probably several hundred thousand tweets over the course of, let's say, 10 years was memory hold before.

And so you couldn't, if you were a historian and you were trying to write about, let's say, Twitter and finance at this time, you couldn't even search Zero Hedges old tweets. I mean, think about how insane that is. That is Orwell, 1984. That is deeply, again, deeply, deeply unethical and bad for civilization. And so, you know, people that are are weak, let's say, are not part of the ruling class institutionally. If you're not a CNN, you can be memory hold. Your entire history, your entire life's work can be memory hold. and disappeared forever. Whereas these other companies can't ever do anything wrong. The same thing applies to, let's say, Iraq war criminals, you know, the people that brought us to the Iraq war based on lies suffered no consequences. And in fact, in a lot of cases have a higher profile positions of power and authority now than they did before. And so it's important to understand. This is very key that the little guy or the average person with no power messes up and you're finished once. The powerful can start wars and kill millions and be promoted. That's the incentive structure.

So it's even worse than sort of what you described. It's essentially a feudal system. We don't live in a rule of law society anymore. I'm sure you're aware of sort of what happens when people get charged with crimes. these days. They pile on the charges so bad that you have to plea. Like most people don't even go to court to try to fight out their charges because if they do and they lose, they're basically, you know what I mean? They're facing decades in jail. So instead they just, you know, a huge, I think it's like 90%. It's like a really high number. People just end up pleading and taking a lesser

sentence and pleading guilty even if they're not guilty to just avoid that risk. And I've seen that over and over. And so, yeah, we have a, we have a completely, again, Max Kaiser, you know, coined this term. It's true. It's neo-feudal or it's financial feudalism. The U.S. today is more akin to a feudal structure when push comes to shove than most people realize. It's really fascinating. I think one of the, one of the things that's so interesting about the post that you wrote today and one of the pieces that I wanted to come back to. And I kind of wanted, maybe this is a good segue to when the cracks started to come in and how you started to kind of make this decision. But one of the lines was about this, right? You said, the imperial oligarchy wants us fighting amongst each other. And it's a

trivial task provided it triggers the culture war hysteria switch embedded in so many across the ideological spectrum. So clearly this is something that you think about a lot, right? That the way power stays in power is to either distract you or to get us engaged in conflict with one another. Right. So, you know, the topics that I discussed, right, that I mentioned were core to my writing over the last decade. You know, think about how often they dominate the narrative. I mean, after what just happened with this another crazy bailout where the fed's now buying corporate bonds, right, high-yield bonds, I mean, think about how little that was discussed. You know, think about the fact that did CNN or Fox, right, did they come out and make that this giant issue?

Like, wait a minute, this is a huge deal. The Fed is now buying corporate bonds. It's never done that, you know? What the heck is going on? No, no, no, no, no. You don't. There's no big discussion as far as, you know, war too. You know, there's never, there's never a question about, you know, is this good?

You know, is American militarism good? is the American Empire good, right? That's not on the table. You know what I'm saying? So like the biggest, the biggest issues, the ones that I talk about the most, are almost never discussed or promoted. But what media does like to do is pick somebody, right? Because you can always find crazy, right?

You can always find bad or demented, just like there's incredible, beautiful, altruistic, selfless people, right? Some people like that, there's just crazy, terrible, evil sociopathic people. And so what media likes to do is they like to take some random person, okay, let's say holding up a maga sign or some random person, let's say holding up a Black Lives Matter sign and then pick the worst possible example from that group saying something crazy, right, or mean that nobody can believe and then they get outraged. And so you can get both sides outraged because then people start thinking, wow, look at look right like so so so the so the so the trump people will see that black lives matter right and they'll say oh my these people look at this they're all like this the left needs to be destroyed and then the left sees the you know the maga person saying something that could be let's say anti-semitic or whatever and and they'll say oh see they're all like this all these trump people they're all they're all they're all hateful they're all bigots they're all white supremacists we got to get rid of them right and so that's and then so everyone's energy is focused on the fact that oh my gosh on the other side there's this existential threat of this mob and they're going to take down the country. And then you don't focus on how power really functions.

And, you know, as I alluded to or more completely bluntly said in my opinion, this is not an accident, right? I mean, if I was in power and I was a psychopath, it's exactly what I would do. It would be easy. And, you know, I've said this before, but one of the more depressing, right, There's been a lot of optimistic things I've come across in the last 10 years, but probably the most depressing realization that I have had. And, you know, there's undercurrents of that in the piece I wrote over the last 10 years is seeing how easily most people are manipulated, you know.

And so if we're talking about, if we're living in a country where there's 325 million people. And let's just say 35% of those are extremely malleable, let's say, to narrative control or manipulation. You're talking about 100 million people. And that's a lot. So how do you overcome that? What do you do about that? I don't know. I tried using reason and doing shows like this to get my points across. I'm really proud that I did that work and it's there, you know, if maybe for the future, for people, maybe maybe 20 years from now, people will sort of see some wisdom there. But, but I don't have an answer other than, you know, I'm going to try to be a great parent, right? I'm going to try to be a great dad. I'm going to try to raise children who are, you know,

decent, ethical, thinking, creative, curious people, adults. because I think we've really messed up. You know, I mean, you look at, you know, like I can get mad. I can say, oh, my God, look at all these people, you know, they don't get anything. But at the same time, like, who knows what sort of education they had, what sort of upbringing they had? Like, did they have abusive parents? You know what I mean? Were they eating junk food their whole lives?

The brains turned to mush. You know, there's a lot of things that, you know, I can be very dismissive and critical, and I often am. But if I want to be more conscious about it, you know, a lot of these people are actually, victims. And I hate to say it, but in a lot of cases, there might not be a possibility to work with them. And so for me, I've got three little ones at home. And my most important job, by far over the next decade, is caring for them and trying to put forth three little souls and be a good guide to them so that they can be stewards of a better civilization one day. It might, you know what I mean?

Like, we might, that might be our only hope is the little ones. And I'm not sure. Do you have kids? I think you might. I have a 20-month-old. Oh, congratulations. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you.

So, yeah, so you're out of the worst right now, right? Like, it's a little bit easier. She, she has made it easy in a way that I know that we'll pay for in 13 years. I mean, she's extremely engaged and has opinions and things. but she's also, she has the gift of being able to make herself, she's really good at communicating even when she doesn't have the words for things. And because of that, we haven't had some of the tantrums and stuff. So we've gotten real lucky. I'm sure, you know, if or when we have a second one, you know, we'll probably get punished them too. But it could be. It could also be, you know,

you seem like a pretty calm guy. I mean, your wife might be pretty calm. You know, I think, to some degree my kids have that kind of that that I don't know how I would call like I kind of iconoclasm or maybe yeah yeah you know so restlessness that I that I that's good but but so so being a father I mean you know what I'm saying you know absolutely and and then and then with and then with gardening to a nature you know I I'm a New York City person by birth I spent 28 years of my life in Manhattan. And I left and moved to Colorado in December 2010. It's about to be 10 years now.

And that was a huge change for me because nature, right, I didn't have growing up, I basically had no interaction with nature. And then being in the competitive world of Wall Street, New York, that's like hyper unnatural. You know what I mean? It's all this sort of esoteric finance and scree. and stocks and currencies and commodities and human competition, money chasing, ego chasing, all that stuff. And you're so disconnected from the natural world that once I came out here and moved out here and started hiking almost every day at first and interacting with nature

on a daily basis, I realized, and this is one of the things I'm probably going to be writing about more when I start writing, is I think that the broken link, right, because human beings for most of our, for most of the thousands and thousands or whatever hundreds of thousands, millions, I don't know, years, the human, the homeosapians have been around, we were so deeply connected to the natural world. You know, it was such a part of who we are, where we come from. And I think that breaking that link, and for a lot of people, the link is broken, particularly if you live in a big city or an apartment, the link, the human link to the natural world, I think is the root of a lot of our problems.

And I think that if more people went on a hike more frequently and took that space and observed the beauty of the natural world and how it functions and how we should be, you know, we should be protecting it. And quite frankly, you know, I spend a couple hours every single morning. It's like my meditation. First thing I do is I go into the garden and I check on everything and I make sure everything's all right.

Usually it takes about two hours. It brings me such peace. such joy. And it's not just me. I think this would be the case for most people. And I think it would make people happier. I think it would make people nicer. I think it would make people more conscious. And I think it would lead to change on an individual level that would then change the world. So, yeah, I'm a huge proponent of spending time in nature. So my wife and I are coming up on three years in the Hudson Valley after about a decade in the absolute epicenter of the rat race of technology in San Francisco.

And so it couldn't agree more. I mean, the way that I describe it is that it turns the volume down on everything. I think family does that too, right? It turns the volume down on this. And I think that, you know, your point, the frustrating sort of cynical but, you know, reasonable version of what you described is, you know, kind of beyond redemption. So I got to focus on the next generation, which I think a lot of people feel. But I think that even if you, even holding aside that conclusion, there is a growing kind of

conversation that we are all kind of stuck in this. So even just today, I think, Ben Hunt wrote this piece called the Anti-Anarchist Cookbook. And he basically makes the comparison between pornography and the way that media is run right now. And instead of going after your pleasure center like pornography does, it goes after your stress centers, right? And so he said in exactly the same way that your real world sex life will be completely messed up. If all you know about sex is what you get from watching porn hub, so will your attitudes about real world citizenship be completely messed up if all you know about politics and culture is what you get from recoil or Huffpo or O'N or CNN or Fox. It's all of us. We're so immersed in the culture,

porn and politics porn that inundates our dopamine-based economy, that half of us believe that the United States is a racist Nazi hellscape, and the other half believes that the United States is literally burning as Maoist mobs run amok. We're all porn addicts now in social media platforms are our pornographers. And I think the reason that I wanted to kind of quote that is that it's, uh, it's not just you, right? There's a growing conversation, almost a recoiling from the, the, the culture of outrage itself. And this is why I think your decision right now is so important or so interesting culturally, right? If the problem itself is outrage culture is the only reasonable response to just disengage from outrage and to try to find,

to choose to avoid it, right? I mean, on some level, we rebel against this, and I'm sure that you've wrestled with this because you're in it, right? You have been a leader in screaming about these issues that are finally starting to get some of the respect that they deserve for so long. But at the same time, in a world where outrage just becomes manipulated, it becomes one more tool of the powerful, is there any choice other than to actually opt out of it and say that's not the way forward? Right. No, this is exactly what's been. consuming my mind for a long time. And you've hit the nail on the head. I mean, you really understand exactly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. And there is a strategic element to it as well.

I mean, not only is it for my own sanity, but as you mentioned, it's not like I don't care. You know what I mean? I obviously care. It's not like I'm giving up. I'm, you know, I'm, you know, dedicated to trying to have an impact in a positive way on my surroundings, right? It's a different approach, as you mentioned. And I'll be the first to admit that if you go back, right, if someone actually went and read my post, if I went and read my posts from 2012 and to now, I would cringe probably at 50% of what I wrote from 2012 to 2017. I would probably cringe at 50% of it because I was in a lot of ways, I mean, not as bad at some of it. of these people. But in a lot of ways, yeah, I was I was pushing outrage, right? I felt that outrage, even though it was genuine and I think it was thoughtful outrage, it was outrage, nonetheless.

And I was trying to actually get people outraged because I figured if people got outraged, but for the right reasons, we could kind of change things. It doesn't work that way or it did not work that way. And that approach I sort of ditched a while ago. But now, yeah, as you say, the problem that we have, I think, is we're not setting, if we're not setting the agenda of what we're talking about, then we've lost. And so by engaging on the controversy of the day, right, whether it's statues, you know, white supremacy, whatever is being promoted by the media or certain people and that everyone seems to need to talk about at this exact moment for some weird. reason. By putting myself in that debate that I didn't bring up to begin with, I'm being played to some degree. My energy is being redirected. It's being pushed in a manner that I don't necessarily want to be going in. But I felt obligated to some degree, because as you say, my hat's been in the ring for so many years. And I do have stuff to say on all this stuff. I feel obligated.

to say something. But as I mentioned earlier, I just don't want to do it anymore. I'm tired of it. You know? And so, you know, I feel like there's a lot of lessons that I can, that I can explain and even relate to the world through other means, you know, through through my day-to-day life. And quite frankly, you know, I want to spend more time with my kids. I want to spend more time being more resilient and growing more food and stuff like that, then I do reading about politics. And so if that's the case, then I should probably, you know, make my work match that. If that's what I want to be doing more of.

So that's what I'm going to be trying to do. And, you know, the other thing is this, you know, when I think back to the last, let's say, 15 years, you know, what books or what articles inspired me most, what really connected with me most, what changed me the most as a person. It wasn't some article about the Fed, you know. It wasn't some article about, you know, culture war or anything like, or politics or even geopolitics. It was, it was like, you know, reading books, let's say, like one of my favorites was the Bhagavad Gita, according to Gandhi. Read that like 12 years ago. And it was really good because it was the Bhagavagata Gita, but it was, you know, essentially narrated by Gandhi, where he

He's providing his own little thoughts on passages from the text. And it's just like there were so many pearls of wisdom there that stuck with me forever. It really just like it flipped a switch in my brain that made me see the world differently forever. And in a better way, I want to be that guy. You know, I want to be Gandhi, obviously. I can't be. I'll never be that.

But what I'm saying is I'd rather be more of that, you know, than some, you know, loud mouth on Twitter. And so, you know, how do I get to be more of the person I want to be than the person I currently am? Well, I got to work on it. Well, that is an awesome place to end. Like I said, I feel really privileged to be able to have this conversation on such an auspicious day. I know that, I mean, just all it takes is reading through the responses to your announcement posts on Twitter to see how much of an impact you and Liberty Breast's Creek have had on people. So I know that all of your loyal readers and friends and fans are excited to see what's next and completely supportive of you in this new mission. Oh, yes, thanks, Nathaniel.

It was really great to be on your show. And anytime you want to do it in the future, we'd be happy to. All right. Next time, it's about gardening and hiking, though. Okay. If you're sure. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know if I can bring enough gardening knowledge.

It's on the list for next. Okay. All right. Michael, thank you so much for hanging out today. I really appreciate the time. The most profound section from Michael's final Liberty Blitzkrieg post read as follows. I want more philosophy in my life and less outrage. I want my words and my message to inspire rather than discourage.

I want to promote resiliency and wisdom in the face of uncertainty and craziness. I want to increasingly focus on the things I love and the things I can control rather than the things I despise and cannot easily influence. I think Michael's journey, as was probably clear from that interview, is reflective of so many more people than just him in this country right now and around the world. And I think that this decision to opt out of, to pull your ticket and say, I'm not going to fuel this outrage culture anymore, is a really powerful move. It's something that I think is very hard for a lot of us who feel like we are in the arena,

right, in the political arena, the idea arena, the economic arena, to say that the only right thing to do is to withdraw. When the rules of the games mean that no one wins, the only thing you can do is choose to not play the game. I'm so appreciative to Michael for giving us the chance to have this conversation just after making such a huge announcement, and I'm excited like I know so many others of you are as well about what comes next. For now, guys, though, that is it for today's breakdown, I appreciate you listening, like, rate, subscribe, leave me reviews, tweet it out, do all the things, share it, uh, and I appreciate it, of course. And until next time, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.