How's it going? Like you'll say that to a stranger on the street, how's it going and they go fine and they keep walking and it apparently perplexes Europeans because if you ask European how you're doing they're going to be like, oh, I guess I'm getting interrogated. Yeah, I actually kind of like hearing people's actual answers. So maybe I'm more European, but a sunny one because Americans are supposed to be. Well, oh, no, so no, so back on the literal answer. I don't, I mean, I think I'm doing well. I think everything's well. How are you doing? Okay. I have animals here that were somewhat restive. So you may see a cat be stroking across my lap at some point. I got, hold on. I got to introduce, introduce you to my new, my new little buddy. This is our newest. Oh, wow. Our newest. Our newest poodle. We've had six now. This is number six. This is Bella. Wow. She's a little nine week old standard poodle puppy. Bella can sell. So very good. Very good. Yeah. We have two older ones. One's called Louis von Mises can sell.  So now we have three, which is a pain. Well, they require some effort, right? They do. We're house training here. We're, we're building a new house. And so my wife's, this is how my wife thinks we should get the new dog now because in a year or two, we move into our new house. She'll already be house-trained. Like, yeah, great. Well, that's an interesting idea. That's, that's, that's thinking ahead. That's, that's an extended time horizon. That's how, yeah, she's very, yeah, she's, she has a long, a high time, a low time preference. There is low time preference. Drinking Diet Coke at 10 in the morning or 9 30 in the morning. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm afraid that this is my biggest vice. So, well, you know, you could have worse vices. I drink a lot more Diet Coke than whiskey. Let's just put it that way. So what's up with you? I saw you last in person, what five or so years ago when we did our little, yeah, the West Coast. Yeah, I'm just in stasis pretty much nothing much has changed. So we'll see how that goes. Okay, so we're doing a podcast. I guess we're doing a podcast. I guess we're doing a podcast. You're not a good marketer are you because we're on this private list together. I've never heard you mention it. Yeah, I don't. I don't. Well, I'm trying to get good at it before I start talking about it. Yeah.  So it's taking some time for me to get used to this whole thing. No, your strong suit sending me rejection letters for Liberty magazine. Well, I was good at that. Yeah, you are very polite. I was wondering how long it would take you to bring that up. Like we may begin right with that. That's our history. But the funny thing was I vaguely remembered your name, Verkala. And I saw some of your articles. But remember when we started talking, was it Facebook or something? I mean, this must be 15 years ago, 10 years. And you were using workmen at the time, right? And you're back on Timmo now. I think you used to be Timothy. Then you went to workmen for a while. Now you're Tim, Timmo again. I don't know. Well, it depends on what crowd are you marketing to? I mean, every discussion is a marketing effort, as you just sort of suggested. And workmen is just sort of a brand I use so people can find me online. Right. And I heard that. And I assumed it was a NEM because I'm so used to libertarians making up these, like, you know, I'm Liberty Valhalla, whatever. They always do these things, right? Michael Mallis and I are good friends now. But at first I was really snarky to him because I assumed Michael Mallis was a, I'm not going to actually go there. I assumed it was a NEM.   And you use it for a while. Like Menchus Mulbug, right? Everyone knows he's Carter Jarvan, so he's not hiding. So he has an identity you can go after. I just, I'm always skeptical of these guys that make up a new identity. They come in, they dive bomb into a conversation and it's like, you can't even, like, talk with them as a human because they're ephemeral, right? They have nothing to lose. They have no reputation. No one knows who they are.   Workman is the Friesian version of Verkala. And it's in the family book dating back to 1546. So it's there for a long time. Your name is Verkala Verkala? Kind of, you know, if you want to put it that way. You're like Garrett Garrett, Garrett Garrett. By the way, that is kind of the reasons I sometimes use it because it just, it pleases me to no end to be somehow allied with Garrett Garrett because he is in my favorite style. I didn't know it was ascending them though. Let me ask you a question. We're already rambling. Are you recording? Because I'm recording this as a backup. Oh, geez. I forgot to start recording. Yeah. I'm glad you were mentioned. Yeah. Okay. Well, here we are. Recording. And then you can use mine if you want to use the first 10 minutes, if mine works. Because Skype has, have you noticed Skype has this new feature, right? I just noticed it. Yeah. I've just noticed it. However, what I like about I'm using Ecamm, which is something I bought to put on side of it. And that gives me some interesting abilities in terms of the kind of quality I get. I agree. You can do separate audio tracks and all that. I have Ecamm, but I don't have it installed on my new computer. So I was going to install it for a talk I did the other day and I realized that Skype now has a built-in recording mode. And the cool thing is it's in the cloud, but I haven't checked the features of it. So I'm doing it as a backup. So we'll see. But yeah. So anyway. You're thinking smart. Anyway, we were talking something about names, I think, is that we were talking about. Oh, well, Garrett Garrett. Yeah. Do you like Garrett Garrett, by the way? You know, I haven't read. Oh, I was going to ask you if you ever accepted Justin Romando's kind of conspiracy theory that Ayn Rand plagiarized Atlas Shrugged from his book The Cinder Buggy or whatever it was. Because there was a guy named Reardon or something. I mean, there was, it was about an industrialist. There's a couple of superficial similarities. Yeah. It's not very convincing. I'm not saying that Ayn Rand didn't actually, it's probably Cryptomnesia. Literally what happened, what they say happened to Lidemar Nabokov with Lolita. Yeah. But I think that it is, I mean, Ayn Rand's case she probably read the book. Cryptomnesia? Cryptomnesia. Yeah, I can see that. You forget it and then you think you invented it yourself. I actually have a fear of Cryptomnesia. It's almost paralyzing sometimes. Because I read it a thousand times. I never think I did it. I always have a vague sense that I think I got this from someone, but I can't remember where or when in the midst of time, which is part of the problem with IP, right? It's like this obsession with, I mean, in ultra property copyright, this obsession with you have to give credit to the original authors. Otherwise, it's plagiarism, which is not even the argument for patent and copyright. But this kind of obsession that will just come up with your own stuff. It's like everyone borrows from things and they're influenced by things and they mix things together and no one, almost no one is this weird mentat genius who keeps a trail of every single inspiration and they mark it down. They get footnoted later. This is not how normal life works, you know? Right. You know? There are very few Teslas in this world who actually invent new things that no one ever thought of before. Well, and I don't even know if Tesla did that. I mean, I think they were all geniuses and they were part of the incremental advance of the sciences, but I tend to think that the way science and technology develops, which is the field of patents, is that number one, an idea can't come before it's time is ready because there's just not the groundwork laid, right? Although, you know, people thought of things 1,000, 2,000 years ago, flying machines, but they just couldn't, they didn't have the technology to do it. But when you start getting all the other sciences and the math and the technological production ready for something, people, but then I think it's basically inevitable. That's why you usually have two, three, four people. I mean, wasn't Tesla one of several people working on different Westinghouse and Edison and all these guys like all competing at the same time for roughly the same terrain? Well, they were certainly on the same terrain, but Tesla did AC and Edison was working on DC.  DC is kind of straightforward, but AC is very different. Oh, yeah. I'm actually an electrical engineer, as you might remember. And so I loved all that. That's one reason I loved all that stuff. I loved the, not the philosophy behind it really, but just the mentality behind some of these ideas. You know how AC has some advantages. DC has some advantages, right? Like AC can be converted easily from one voltage to another because it's a sinusoidal wave, right? So you can have a transformer induction sort of action. DC is harder to convert, but on the other hand, DC doesn't go back and forth. So it doesn't have as much friction, so to speak, in the wires. So you can, you could send high voltage DC across longer distances on power lines without as much loss because it's not oscillating, right? But if it doesn't oscillate, you have your own problems. And if it's high voltage, you have another problem, it's dangerous, right? So it's dangerous. But yeah, that whole stuff, all that stuff, that whole field fascinates me. But I've never been into Tesla too much except from, you know, that movie where the magicians disappear or something. Oh, The Prestige. Yeah. That's an amazingly good movie, based on a very good science fiction novel by Christopher Priest. So yeah, that's a favorite, though. I wouldn't exactly go to that movie for my ideas on Tesla. No, I know. That's what I mean. So you hear about Tesla from the sort of, you know, what do you call the turn of the fende siècle? Jeff Tucker and I sometimes joke about these, all these fancy terms for the Belle Epoque, you know, the beautiful era, basically the 1880s to the 1920s, right? Like this kind of amazing, so I think there's fende siècle, turn of the century. There's, which I'm probably mispronouncing, because I don't speak French. I guess that's French. That's French. And Belle Epoque, I guess that's another French term. Beautiful arrow. There's another, oh, Gilded Age, the Gilded Age. And that's very American. That was given to us by Mark Twain, that term. Yeah, yeah. And it's kind of odd about the, we could talk about the Gilded Age. Actually, that's kind of interesting because, because that's also the age coming out of the Civil War, which is certainly a strange time in American history. Well, I was just reading, I was listening to a podcast a day or two ago with a, oh God, I think it might have been Thaddeus Russell or Tom Woods, one of those guys, because they, they're some of my favorites, but I think, I think it was Tom Woods. They were talking about the, yeah, it was Tom Woods interviewing Herbunner, that sort of was Tom Woods interviewing Jeffrey Herbunner. And they ended up getting to this, this forgotten recession of 1921, 22, something like that, which Tom's written about and Herbunner's studied. But they were talking about the precursors to it, which was like, from like the 1880s to about the 1900s, there was this kind of weird, like flip-flop of what you think of now as the Republicans and Democrats. Like the Democrats wanted to, especially after the, after World War I, the Democrats wanted to like, get fiscal responsibility and restraint spending and restraint inflation and prices. And the Republicans wanted the opposite. So, so almost like the opposite of now, but... That was before World War I. But you could be right. I thought it was, I thought they were trying to restore prices to the level they had been before World War I. So, like after, which had something to do with that 1921, 22 episode. But yeah, there's something in the 1880s with all this. Yeah, my history is really weak on this stuff, but it's fascinating. It is amazing. I dip into it quite a bit, but I don't retain everything I read, which is one of those unfortunate things about getting old. I think, by the way, I think I heard that there's a, well, this is about nine months or a year ago. I think there's a series in the works like Netflix or Amazon or HBO is called the Gilded Age. And so it looked like one of these high quality prestige, you know, cable TV trauma things, which was going to be set from like, probably the late 1880s to the early 1900s, which could have been interesting, right? The Rockefellers and Vanderbilt, all that kind of stuff. Of course, they'll, you know, you and I both know they'll mingle it totally. They'll have to, of course, trade them as insidious evil demons in the background. But, you know, it could have been interesting, but I have a feeling COVID might have delayed all that. How do you do COVID, by the way? Well, you know, that's kind of an interesting story because I had a strange illness in February. It lingered from February through March. I had two bouts of it, sap nearly all of my energy, dry cough, not phlegm. I even had a marker for a rash, but did I have it? I don't know. Oh, you mean you think you might have had COVID? Yeah, I might have. Early. And the fact that so many people we know had a strange flu in December, January, February and March, and it was all over the place. I mean, it was in England and on the West Coast, especially, but they never talked about it. They never talked about if there's a non, if there's a strange flu going on that's not COVID, we never heard about it from the important people. It made me very skeptical about the whole thing from the beginning. Yeah, I don't know where you're on this. I think you're more into conspiracies than I am, but I tend to think that the number of deaths is probably over counted, but the number of cases is probably under counted, but I don't know. I really don't know. That's been my... I don't care about things I can't affect, so what can you do? I mean, either this huge tsunami of grief is coming or I mean, and it already has in a way because of the response to it, if nothing else. Yeah, that's a very stoic or epicurian attitude of yours, very Hellenistic, I should say. Oh, my wife and I... Most people I talk to, my dad, my wife, other people, they ask these questions like A, B, and C, like, what should I do in this case? And I'm like, what does it matter because what's coming is coming, and your little actions won't affect it. So, yeah, I think you should accept... Yeah, it's the Irish poem, like, God give me the grace to know the difference, you know, that kind of thing. It's common sense in a way. Like, don't get excited about things. Like, my wife always wants to bury, dig into the details of things that really won't matter, like, if you know them or not. Like, well, I want to find out what this guy would have charged or was going to charge or, you know, things like that. And I'm like, yeah, but we already have a contract. We're going to have to pay it no matter what. So, we're going to do the... We know what we're going to do. So, whatever's coming is coming. We don't know it yet. And people don't like to look at things like that. So, I like to try to make people say, like, so what's your action? What's your point? What's your goal? And they'll finally admit something like, well, I just want to know. They'll say that. Like, yeah, okay. But then what are you going to do? Because whether it's A or B, it's not going to affect your actions. We just settle that. So, what's the point of knowing? Just wait for it to happen, man. But yeah, some people just are anxious.  I have a slightly...  So, my dad, who I love, he's 82. He's in Louisiana. I helped him get set up on this account called Freshly, which they order food. And because he and my mom are landlocked in, you know... So, he gets this food from Freshly. It's prepared food in a box, right? It's not frozen. It's prepared food that you get. You can microwave it. It's just a meal. And so, they accidentally... So, he did it on his own. He got it set up. But then they sent him, like, 12 extra meals, like, last week. And he called me all in a tizzy about it. Number one, wanting me to give him the phone number, which, you know, because if you're 82, you don't have to go Freshly.com and find the phone number. But this is how dads do. They're looking for excuses to call their kids or they just want to call for a helpline. And they know that the helpline that the company is going to send.  You know what I mean? This is how it goes. But the funny thing was, I just said, Dad, why do you want their phone number?  Like, there's no phone number to call and talk to a human. You know what I mean? And we all know what it's futile. So, you either give it away, you accept the loss, or you just order another one. You know how you and I would deal with it. But he wants to call them. And I said, why do you want to call them? He's like, well, I want to know what I should do with this extra food. I said, Dad, you're going to talk to some chicken in Minnesota or maybe Taiwan or Vietnam.  I mean, use the food or get rid of it. You know? So, he finally admitted, well, he really wanted not to be charged for the extra food. I said, okay, that's reasonable. Okay.  But he's first said, I want to call them to accept this food, you know? But it's a whole different generational attitude towards everything. Customer service, internet things, you know, giving your credit card out online, that kind of stuff. Sorry, ranting and dissembling, but I just find people's reactions to all this stuff to be amazingly interesting because it's always so different. Some people treat some things so differently. They will spend three hours trying to debug an issue which other people know how to debug in two seconds or two minutes or they just blow it off. But some people just can't do that. Yeah. Regarding COVID, which is something I can speak to, is that I'm actually very fascinated about what is happening. Not to the point that I'm actually studying it in depth, but I do keep track of the various theories and bits of information. And I have my own theories, blah, blah, blah. But the point that I'm not anxious about it, because once again, how is it going to affect me? Well, I might die because of it. That's true. But, you know, I might die any day now. I mean, this is after your 50, certainly after your 60, there's no reason to be anxious about death anymore. No, you've already, after your 50 or 60, you've already sort of everything surplus now. Like it's all just like in Louisiana, they call it an app. It's a little bit extra. It's like, yeah, just be grateful. Oh, your COVID hair doesn't look too bad. Your COVID hair looks pretty cool.  Well, I was. I haven't been out in quite a long time, but yeah. In the days where I rejected your submissions, I had very long hair. To get the checks? No, no.  It's just, it's one way that people adapt. And I couldn't, at that time, I could not wear closed face helmets. And, but that meant that I had open face helmet. And the, if I had normal hair with the bangs or something, it would get in my eyes.   So at that point, I decided that for everybody's good, societies and mine.   What's wrong with living like Jesus? Okay. No, I never heard that one, but he probably didn't exist, but okay. Well, yeah, I understand what you're saying.  There's Hotep Jesus. Yeah, there you are. So what's the thing about clothes and open helmets? So like, if you take a typical street bike rider who's going down the interstate, like Peter Fonda, I thought everyone wore open faced helmets pretty much. I wear a closed face. Now I have a one that flips up like this. When I come to a stop, it's too suffocating for me. A mask. We all know about masks now. Yeah. And so I use one of those and I got used to it. It's a double visor. The clear part can go up and then the whole thing can go up and that allows me to run around with a much safer helmet. Having a front bar is much safer. So that's the idea. It's like full head protection or something like that. I got you. You're kind of low on the screen now. Sorry, thank you. I used to ride dirt bikes all the time. I've never ridden a street bike because I'm terrified of them and plus I have a wife now and when you have a wife your freedom gets diminished. So Harry Brown might have had a point about never get married because it's like it's a restriction on your freedom. So I can't ever ride a street bike. I've always wanted to ride a street bike to be honest because I've ridden dirt bikes all my life and I love them. Love them, love them, love them. But I never had a closed face helmet. This was back in the 80s and 90s. It was always open face that I recall. Well that was before good technology. That's basically it. Oh sure. I remember when I was riding they would say oh now we have something called mono shock. Like it occurred to someone one day if you're going to have a spring action and on your rear wheels why not just use one spring instead of two? You know and and all these all these innovations are crazy. On the other hand the price is insane too. I'm never sure if it's because technology is so much better or because inflation. But I mean I remember I bought my first like a Honda XR80 and then a 100 and then a 2 whatever it was back in the like mid late 80s we're talking $400, $900, $1000, $1100 Now they're like $8000 for a brand new stacked out Honda XL 250 or whatever and I wonder if they're just that much better or if it's just pure inflation. I guess it's a combination but I don't know. Yeah I don't know either. I looked at a new Honda the small wheel, sort of like their version of a Vespa it's a real cool looking kind of scooter-ish thing. Half dirt bike, half scooter. I'm not sure what you would say about it. It's like a 250. And I asked the young man who was riding it and he said it's about $3300. New, brand new. Brand new. Of course I don't buy things brand new like that. I'm not going to buy a brand new. You don't actually need to. You could get a user for one-third the price or something like that. So yeah, of course. And the great thing about bikes is that there's a lot of people who buy bikes that never use them. Correct. Yeah, so you can get a really good one. Yeah, that would be me. Yeah. It's been one of my fantasies in my 50s to like get back to dirt bike riding.  There's in our neighborhood. I mean, and there's no room in the garage. I mean, where do you put it? And there's no industry. Here's the thing. If I could go once a month and go ride a bike and rent it, it would be the heaven for me. But there's not an industry for that. You know, you know what I mean? Like you can't go as far as I know at least around Houston, Texas. There's no like dirt bike park within 100 mile radius bikes. You can just go and rent them on the day you need them and equipment and everything because no one does that.  You know what I mean? Right. So there's just not a market for it. Yeah. Good market. I have to like hire, you know, some storage unit out 100 miles from my house and put a trailer in it. Put a bike in it. Get a trailer hitch on my car. Hire a mechanic to go out there and do everything for me on occasion that I used to do as a young 17 year old who knew how to do everything.  But that's my dream actually. I want to get back to dirt bike riding someday. I love it. It's one of my favorite activities. Oh. I mean, if you could like name the top two or three or four or five most fun things to do in life. We all know what they are, right?  That's obvious, right? Freedos with French onion dip, right? Dirt bike and maybe snow skiing. Snow skiing is fun too. But I'd say dirt bikes. Dirt bikes is up there. I would probably put and I have a feeling the street bikes are up there, but I haven't had that pleasure yet. I love it. But it's not the same thing in many ways. It's a much more genteel activity. Right. I know. I know it's different. But I feel the tug of it. But I just can't go there because I know so many guys that just they've been totally killed or their lives ruined because some car fucks up and smashes the guy. The good thing about dirt bikes is you know it's just you against the trees and you know what, if I hit a tree it's my fault. But I can control that.  You know what I mean? That's what you can't control. That's the problem. Right. Well, there's a few tricks. One is that you do not drive in and around cities when there's traffic. That's a very important thing. And the other is that there are things you can do when you approach cars on the road. Like where I live right now, this is actually the ideal motorcycle riding area. Because there isn't that much traffic on the highways. The highways are generally safe. And if somebody is coming at you and that is a problem for a motorcycle because people can do the craziest things. Well, then I do things. Like I start weaving a little bit within my lane. Just that alone it's not cool. You have to remind them that you exist even if it's innocuous. Because people... Well, I think there's all these strobe lights now and there's all these kind of colorful vests people wear and they do things, right? That attract attention, which makes sense. Right. The other thing is just at that speed you have to go get away from other cars in your lane. Yeah.  You can't be around other vehicles, basically. That's just not a good idea in motorcycle riding. But try explaining that to a policeman who's wondering why you're going 90 miles an hour on a country road. That's an interesting conversation. I guess if he rides a motorcycle he understands. But if he doesn't, then you're screwed. Yeah. I have a fun relationship to traffic cops. It's an interesting relationship. I've actually used in court the theory of risk-comeostasis. So that's one up for me. Risk-comeostasis. That's Sam Peltzman's theory, basically, of that one... has a basic risk level one wants to maintain. So if one is safer in one realm, let's say made safer by a safety belt or something, one tends to compensate by more reckless behavior than you would have without the safety measure. Oh, it's like conservation of risk or something? Yes, yes. Okay. Hold on, I'm stepping away to check something. And now I see your background screen. You've vanished it as if it were a science fiction scenario. I know, it's crazy.  I'm not even using a green screen. I'm just using my Skype special magical special effects. Yeah, it's quite the thing. And that's just simply to get rid of... Excuse me? Oh, well, I just do it because I'm just... I'm just in a bedroom, which is not interesting. I'm not in my study. In my new house, I'm going to have a study where I can... I'll have an interesting intellectual background like you have. Okay. But since COVID, my son, who's a high school senior now, he's taking courses online. So he took over our study downstairs to do his work. And then my wife took over my study to do her work. And then we made a little office in the bedroom for me. So, you know, everyone's doing this stuff, right? In COVID. So it's just... It's just not a great... Well, it's fine. I don't care. I'm just... I do like to play around with technology. It's a real answer. In your practice, do you go to the office much at all? No, so here's the deal. My practice is for about seven, eight, nine years now, I quit... I quit this job I had, which was as an employee, as an in-house counsel, as a general counsel of a high-tech company. In about 30 minutes outside of my house in Houston, but I still do some of their patent work for them as my client now. So I basically... I'm just a solo patent lawyer working from home.  My office is by laptop. Anywhere I am, I could do my work. It's easy. It's a weird thing. I don't need assistants anymore. I don't need staff. Right. So I don't go anywhere. No, I actually have an office at that laser company. They gave me an office and I was going there every couple of weeks, like to check in and to use their office and to get out of the house. But no, I just stay here now. And so my wife does too. She works in downtown Houston, usually as an oil trader for Shell. And my son usually goes down the street for high school, but so everyone's just here and we're the type of modern techno 21st century yuppies that we can still do things from home. Not everyone can do that. Certain jobs require presence, or physical interaction or whatever. It used to be the case that nearly every job did, but now there's an increasing number of jobs. What I've been doing, I can do anywhere as well. I take my iPad wherever I want to go and I do when I work there. What are you doing? Like editing and stuff like that? Yeah, yeah. What kind of do you use the iPad with the keyboard? Sometimes. But you know, if I'm in a restaurant... You're going to edit documents. What? If you're going to edit documents, the keyboard is like, I think it's essential. Well, the way I do it, often I don't. The iPad is an amazing device. It's a very easy to use. Like I say, if I'm writing and want to write fast, I'll use the keyboard. And some editing I use the keyboard, but you know, you can click and you can do everything you need to on an iPad. Oh, yeah. Writing and editing are different. If you're writing a lot, yeah, I think you really need it. That's just me, because I can actually type. So if I don't have a keyboard, I'm hobbled. And the little keyboard on my little old iPad is great. I love this little thing. I don't know if you have one of those. Now the new one, the Magic keyboard here is awesome on the iPad Pro. But it's kind of a major ordeal. It makes it basically as big as a MacBook or a MacBook Air almost. So I'm thinking like, yeah, why not just use a MacBook? But I understand it. To me, this fascinates me. What you can do with these little devices, I mean, to be honest, you probably know that you can theoretically, you could probably do a lot of what you want to do on your iPhone or something like that or an Android phone. It's amazing what you can do now. They're harder to see, but you could get a screen, you could get a portable screen, you could get a portable keyboard.  I'm pretty much committed to if it weren't for just a few apps or some software on my computer, I probably would just use iPads all the time. I would love to only use an iPad because they update all the time instantly. Everything's in the cloud. But just for the way I use them, I do a lot of alt-tabbing, cutting and pasting and things that they're just so much more even today. They're so much more onerous on an iPad just because they're not designed for that kind of yeah, but if you just wanted to check email and edit some things and use Google Docs and check the web and have your apps that do A, B, and C for you. I agree. Well, I have a computer. Yeah. I bet you do.  I have a Mac Pro here with a big screen here. I used to have two screens but for some reason my second screen went out. You have a Mac Pro. The one that's the cylinder or an old one? No, this is legacy. This is from 2010. So this might be a classic at some point. Well, it's still it's still not vintage and it's not obsolete. But it's going to be obsolete in the year or two probably because the latest version of Mac OS X doesn't work on it and the last two and I'm going to upgrade it to get the penultimate but at some point it's going to go but I don't know since I use the iPad so much the idea of upgrading my Mac. Yeah, it's crazy. I agree. It's crazy. It's like why well, so here's a funny thing. Like on zoom. I'm using this background on Skype ever since the COVID things zoom has sort of taken over but they're all trying to compete with each other and so they have this you can put a background up, right? By the way, if you put a green screen up it can be even better. They have a better technology at least with zoom but so here's the funny thing. They said that like I have like three MacBooks this is a brand new MacBook Air that we're using right now that I'm using right now and so I can do on zoom I can do these backgrounds like like this and they can be gift backgrounds too they can move they don't they can be movies they don't have to be static right but but my old MacBooks which are like three years old or two years they're not that they can't do it because they don't have the right processor they just can't keep up with the video stuff however my two or three year old iPad can so the video processing and the processing power in these iPads is really incredible right I mean because it's so dedicated it's so subtly locked into like it's like a more of a bulletproof OS It is kind of Steve Jobs' dream he's finally got he finally had the thing that he really wanted all along I think with his original Macintosh idea this is actually the iPad is the culmination of that whole trend almost I think it I think it's just the problem is the the interface the input output and I just still don't see that happening but for most people yeah I mean I'm actually a little bit worried that Apple's just going to discontinue the Macs because it's like they might keep the pros but they might excuse you Macs because most people it's good enough for 90% of their market and I'll be screwed because I actually have a need you really like the air you've been talking about the air for years now well I like the MacBook actually the one that came out about three years ago which was smaller than the air because they were going to let the air go kind of expire and they came up with a new MacBook which is even smaller so it was better for me on airplanes and travel which I'm not doing anymore who knows when I'll do that again it was lighter thinner smaller than the air the MacBook was amazing that's why I still got two because I'm keeping them as legacy eventually they're going to do what yours is doing like they can't run certain things but like they can't run the background on zoom right so they tell you you need with your MacBook you need a green screen well I have a Mac Macbook a Mac Pro yeah I know but you said your old Mac Pro there are certain limitations like things that still is like he didn't you say there was something it can't do well the new operating system is not available so far I can do everything I want it to do but the new operating system is not available yeah but that's my point so like you're getting to the point where it's not compatible with all the new advances and but yeah I like the air I'm glad they brought it back it's good it's for me it's a little bit too big actually I like the smaller ones but that's just the way it is but because I like extreme portability I like it to be like the MacBook was the size of the frickin iPad I mean it's crazy but I think I think most people honestly have just vision issues I mean I do too I'm wearing glasses but some people just they want a big screen I don't want a big screen I want it to be compact solid and just exactly what you need but you know everyone has their own thing the problem is if you're in a niche market like if you're a guy that's like only one percent of all people like you then they're just basically not going to cater to you you know they're going to cater to the to the big sales right right but I have only half of your so wait so stop for a second what's the name of your podcast tell me Locofoco netcast Oh Locofoco Remember Locofoco? I do Do you explain Locofoco at the beginning of every podcast so people understand what you're talking about or do you just assume that they get it I have had a special episode dedicated to Locofoco Well I understand but no okay but when you listen to the podcast for the first time do people know what Locofoco means No Okay is that on purpose or just a lack of caring? Lassitude Yeah I mean part of it is just simply part of it is just kind of a funny word and there's plenty of podcasts with funny names you know so if they're puzzled by it at some point they're going to run a run into the explanation they could of course go on Wikipedia they could of course go on Wikipedia and say what is this Locofoco thing about and they'd find out right away though I'm not sure Wikipedia is where I would go to find out about the Locofoco but I did have a special podcast with Anthony Kamegna explaining the Locofoco Anthony Kamegna who's now with ISIL nothing Institute for Humane Studies So are they still around? I was actually just IHS I'm pretty sure Institute for Humane Studies and he has his own podcast called Ideas in Progress so but he's a very good historian he actually did his thesis on the Locofoco and he had a very comprehensive thesis he should make it into a book but he hasn't done so yet Did you hear yet Tom Woods had a interview with Pete Kenyonius do you know who he is he's the guy who was behind that that video that that documentary I've listened to the first three minutes of it and then I had to put it down I've not gone back to it yet Yeah give it a shot it's I thought it was pretty good well I've already heard the video and I mean have you listen have you you're aware of the documentary right I'm aware of the documentary but have not seen it okay yeah so once you see it then the interview is is interesting but it's like it goes over things that you would already know and you and I already know because we're we're old timers in the movement whatever movement this is yes and you know I mean I was you know a Liberty guy you've been around here for a long time contributing with Hapa and others in the Mises Institute you have a you still have a relationship with the Mises Institute hmm that's an interesting I think most people from an outside observer status like aliens landing on the earth looking at human relations trying to figure things out would probably say yes okay I mean it's not I'm not like well first of all things have changed since COVID but um I'm not like one of the regular lecturers are getting invited things all the time but I have good connections to a lot of the top people there and I did get invited I mean to be honest there was a bit of a falling out um not really falling out but things change over time this is how it happens and people that are look I don't like to say I'm a scholar intellectual I'm just a I would say I'm a gentleman scholar but I'm not even a gentleman but you know just like you know there are different types of people Esquire Stephen true true true I do have the Esquire qualifications I'm a doctor um no the I was more closely aligned with them just by sort of inertia or what made sense to me for about 15 years um let's say from 19 do you want to talk about this or should I well you want it on the podcast or not that's that's that's interesting I don't care dude I don't care well I mean you're friends with Jeffrey Tucker right I'm friends with lots of people friends with you and friends with lots of people um Jeff and I started becoming closer friends as I started um you know people know me as the IP guy and you know I don't mind that I'm not like one of these bands that has a one hit wonder and they hate they hate having to perform you know 99 love balloons over and over and over again because that's their only hit but they have to do it because they have nothing else they can do I mean I went into the IP field on purpose but I mean in Libertarian theory and I'm happy about that um and it's been fruitful but it's it was never like you know it never defined me and I think most people I don't think most people think that I mean there's some people who don't know much and they think oh can sell as the IP guy that's it but to me it was always other things that interested me more right rights theory and various aspects of libertarian legal theory but I saw that there was a there was a need for someone to like tackle this issue um starting in the mid 1990s because I couldn't figure it out and I was smart and I had read Rand and Rothbard and you know all the people and everyone messed everything up and I was thinking like okay I'll I'm going to start practicing as a lawyer and plus I'm libertarian writing I'll maybe I can help figure it out and so I tried and tried and tried and I was actually it was like you know the atheist who's trying to find the better proof that I was trying to find okay Rand's argument for IP makes no sense Rothbard's argument for IP makes no sense AP&C makes no sense but we all know that it's legitimate so okay I'll do it I mean how hard can it be honestly you don't have to be a Wittgenstein or I don't know who you consider to be your greatest who's your top three or four geniuses of all time and don't say Spencer I don't know who would be I don't know who would be the I don't think of the world like that I don't either I don't think of the way either since my favorite writers are almost never the ones that people consider the great geniuses like you just mentioned one of the 20th century philosophers I mean I like George Santayana and Alexius Meinang I'm not going to get me any Benny's with the in-crowd so wait so Gary Garrett is that who you're referring to right now no you said one of your favorite writers George Santayana but I do think Gary Garrett is a great writer but earlier you had said that you really liked a lot of the pros I mean so Santayana is like in Spanish what's his language no his language is English he was a Spanish American his father was Spanish but his mother was American and he was a Harvard professor and then gave it up to write independently out there in the world moved to Europe and lived cheaply and wrote books oh okay so you see this is one of those cases where you just open my mind to something because like I get these ideas like okay there's a guy out there who's everyone says is great like good or someone like that you know but unfortunately I don't speak their language and I don't usually trust translations especially for especially for things that are I won't say poetry but they're mired in the manipulation of the language right I'll read it on occasion like if it's a novel there's a plot you can translate but some pros some feelings some things I can always see I'll never I'll never see it if I don't speak that language I always assumed Santayana was a yeah I've never read him I mean I've read about him but yeah I thought he was Spanish or Portuguese or something well his background is Spanish but that's he's just an American American expatriate writer basically he left fairly early so he wrote in English like that was his natural language and beautifully in English probably the best prose stylist of 20th century philosophy well I was going to ask you which Gary Gary you recommend because I've never been impressed by him either but I haven't tried it too much but if if you want to if you want to recommend a couple things I would love to have like a couple of things to dig into like Santayana or whatever yeah well Santayana is how shall I put this I don't know where to tell a person to go for Santayana because everybody has their different interests right I think that you should try reading his essay The Unknowable which is alas his Herbert Spencer Memorial Lecture and it begins with the discussion of Spencer but he's also a beautiful piece of writing and then he does something amazing in metaphysics I knew you were bringing Spencer in I knew it I told you I predicted this well of course yeah I mean Spencer is this weird touchstone I have just like I would normally have probably something like Ludwig von Mises or Manger is my other touchstone really Manger and Spencer are probably the two most important social thinkers for me and I keep on coming back to what do you think about Bamba Verk absolute genius and his book on Capital and Interest the history of Capital and Interest series maybe one of the greatest books ever written have you read his what's it called Four Shorter Classics or whatever which to me has like this amazing essay right on you froze uh oh we have a froze we have a freeze you said this we just froze are we back yep I think we're back so you were talking about some of the shorter essays by Bamba Verk that's where we froze on and uh I think it's a book called shorter essays or something like four essays and one of them is on legal legal relationships and how they relate to economics right and it's brilliant right I think it's brilliant I mean it's it's before it's time in a sense I don't know if you could one interesting thing about this I mean you're used to this because this is what you like you read these older guys and you have to give them you have to give them a break right like okay they're not speaking our language exactly and they don't have footnotes from a 2009 Steven Pinker article or whatever because it was you know 120 years ago or whatever so you got to give them a break you have to read it with a little bit of I don't see charity might be the right word but you have to like well you'll see if you listen to this Tom Woods interview with Pete Kinyone like where they're talking about how they incorporated some of the left libertarian anarchists into the documentary and Tom was complimenting Pete on being really uh fair to the left libertarian anarchists and his point was I'm not sure if the reverse would have been the case in other words if this had been a left libertarian documentary about Emma Goldman and all these guys like if they had even decided to mention the right libertarian guys the right anarchist precursors I don't know if they'd be as fair to them as we were to them there was an interesting point I don't know I don't know what the truth is but I think he might be roughly right roughly right that's a sad thing about left and right these days and that seems to be endemic on the left is their their insularity and their just bad manners yeah and of course I think that's true more among the activists and these people are not they're not like really intellectuals I mean you'll get the occasional left libertarian who will be proposing you know basic guaranteed income or something and my thinking is they're usually either they're low level thinkers in terms of they're just not that impressive scholars or you know or they're unfair but I don't know I mean it's just it's probably just the way it is I mean we have all of us have in a way slim pickings like the people that we choose to be our our thinkers or avatars nowadays I mean I do think I mean what do you think about this let me ask you this question slightly changed subject but like say in the because you've been around the libertarian movement how long have you how long have you been a libertarian would you say since 1980 1980 what happened in 80 well one thing was the Clark campaign and that did actually get me to meet libertarians for the first time I had read Robert Nozick prior to that and I had and I had read Ernst van den Haag's absolute devastating article against libertarians in national review and then in the inquiry the defense of themselves by you know David Friedman and Marie Rothbard and others I defended them yeah this is vaguely so remind me I like I feel like I'm a newbie here because I'm not really familiar with the van den Haag national review criticism of libertarians he basically called libertarians lunatics they're extreme extremist lunatics they're not conservative they are radical there might as well be socialists they're awful you gotta be fucking kidding me that's basically the idea he was getting across it was very nasty and very funny but it was not the high point of libertarian national review relations so I guess we're back I think we're back yeah I heard a little bit yeah but keep saying poor connection you ever notice some people talk and they have a poor connection they always blame the other guys like I don't know what's going on in Seattle but I mean Portland or whatever right right and I don't know what's going on I actually have a VPN going right now I probably usually that makes the thing better but maybe I should take the VPN off which country are you going through well it's going through Seattle probably and then oh you didn't choose like Singapore or something well it often gives me it has some sort of phantom in Italy that I often hit well I think I'm not on VPN but um I didn't even think about it I wonder what would happen if I turned it off right now you have any idea I think Skype would adapt because they should try to you froze but then you're back very good it worked pretty well I'm rambling all over the place yeah well we're not really the subject that I chose for us today is not going to be addressed obviously we're just having a chat what was our subject what was it supposed to be well I was going to ask you about legal positivism but let's carry on with our discussion of the deep history of our libertarian connections you were asking about Ernst von den Haag and that's where we were last in our conversation well what I was going to ask you was if you agree if by some strange um so I think the libertarian movement well let's look at it as an overview the libertarian movement I would say started in the 50s and 60s right that's what I think now there are precursors no doubt um but I think that basically it was Ayn Rand, Leonard Reed Milton Friedman and then Rothbard to some degree Hayek and Mises but I think the modern libertarian movement is an American thing that came out of certain thinkers and their popularity and their message in the in the 60s and 70s I mean roughly would you agree with that? that is the modern libertarian movement right Brian already likes to mention the three women, Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder-Lane and Ayn Rand and they make a lot of sense but see I'm 40 years I came in 40 years after that period or 35 years after those three women did their thing and 20 years after the efflorescence of the Samasdott aspect of the libertarian movement which Brian already did not talk about very much there were a number of libertarian zines as we might say in the early late 60s that are not known and are not really talked about historically but they were very important I think to help the movement as it were and certainly they fed into Yaff Yaff got a lot of their a lot of their impetus from the Samasdott era and of course that book by Jerome T'Chile it usually because of Ayn Rand I mean I'm sure you've read it to me to me it's an amazing book and it's probably a book of its time and it was the perspective of one guy who I'm not sure is libertarian to be honest but it was a good journalistic sort of humorous intelligent look at this meaning sort of set of ideas right yes now but what it seems to me is this is that if I take like my place in this movement like not my place but like my when I came into it like in the in the mid 80s it was growing already you know it already had a place with the the earlier campaign you're talking about and the libertarian party and the Mises Institute and you know this weird cult around Ayn Rand and her whole thing right and then things like Liberty Magazine and Reason Magazine right I think all that is basically part of the story but and it seems to me that Ron Paul his movement which I was never into but I can see why that would have attracted a huge new number of college students and activists and whatever so I feel like our numbers started getting bigger hold on I feel like our numbers started getting bigger like in the in the 80s I'm sort of the 90s hold on I don't hear you right now let me get back into my position here I'm almost glued to it by now barely yeah if you there's something with your headset it's very low can you hear me yes I can sorry I switched to my AirPods because I don't know what happened I like the sound better well I've been fighting this using this because it can't be better but it seems to be I mean I bought these crazy Jabra headphones which have noise cancellation but they're just they're nothing good I go crazy over audio by the way I'm not a techno file like you are and I don't know how to do it if I had a professional thing where this was my job I would figure it out but I can't get a good connection then the best always is the stupid oh so you're using the Apple ear buds for monitoring only these are just yeah these are just headphones I have professional headphones right here but it looks stupid on my head no but I mean you can hear that but your voice is going through the microphone anyway oh I have two microphones set up to a Scarlett Focusrite system and it's going through fairly professional equipment well the thing is I've got two or three of these things I've got the snowball mic and I can never get them to like they're always too low so I need a professional to help me but anyway sorry what were we talking about now I've gotten distracted well you were talking something about the Libertarian movement seemed to be growing in the 90s we came in in the 80s you and I both are kind of in the same generation just a little bit of a lag well I was going to ask you if you agree that like so my impression is that the movement has gotten bigger in the sense of more people and more prominence people I find that the mainstream media cable news companies whatever they don't misuse the word Libertarian as much as they used to like they used to always call the conservative Kato Institute you know what I mean like they always did that they still do it from time to time but it seems like there's a an increasing awareness of what Libertarians are so from the media point of view and from the mainstream point of view I think that people know what Libertarians are right but and I also feel like the okay in a sense that so I think most of the people we've drawn in have been activists right I'm sorry going to quiet mode they've been activists now activists are not always the most intellectual or scholarly or academic of people on the other hand Libertarians have gotten more radical like they want to abolish the Fed now you know they want to do a B and C they're not all anarchist but so I feel like in some sense that there's more Libertarians now and their quality is higher however there's something about these Libertarians in the 60s and 70s and 80s mostly the Randians to be honest like they had this sort of hyper respect for scholarship and most Libertarians you would meet at least the ones I would meet and probably the ones you would meet like at these gatherings that we would do they would be the type that are the intellectual ones like they've read the reason magazine articles they've read the Liberty articles they've read the journals they knew about the three or four journals we had at the time right the Jeffrey what was Jeffrey Friedman when I keep forgetting the name the one Jeffrey Friedman edited forever there's reason papers there's Liberty there's just this material and it was just like there wasn't a lot of it and so you could basically absorb it all if you were a complete but now I'm thinking like no that was just me as an idiot you know sophomore junior in college going to the library and reading everything because I was a dork I don't think everyone's like that though which is fine right you know what I mean right so my view is that the Liberty movement is bigger now but it's not only stupider and not only stupider but in terms of less intellectual and more activist and more Rom Paulian but like less aware of the entire history of our movement they haven't read you know everyone I would bump into like at a thing in 1992 they've read Ethics of Liberty by Rothbard for example some of them might have read Nozick but now you meet people they don't even know what you're talking about right and it's not like they've moved on to the new guys they just haven't read anything like don't read pamphlets like so now the thing is pamphlets some of them are disguised as books but they're basically pamphlets right and that's fine that's how ideas get procreated the guys understand them they want to have their own little brand but I mean you probably come across three, four, five, ten libertarian books which are more or less right and they're impressive but they're just regurgitations in a simplistic way of what was figured out before and I don't think anyone even reads those so it's a weird thing that's happened but anyway that's just my my venting on that issue what do you think about it well we're in the age of podcasts and people get their information from podcasts and if they want to be intellectual they go to Quora um I know that's a joke but if they want me you're gonna go to Quora um yeah it's an interesting situation with just a different intellectual landscape but I wonder if to what extent it's true your painting of the older picture because when I got into the first libertarian group I got involved with in 1980 within two months they were telling people new people to come to me to explain everything um so obviously the old hands had not read all that much right you could be right but they were aware of them they were aware of them well so I guess what I'm trying to say is my impression of the old guys was that they were more they were way more respectable and statist like they're way more menarchists and randians right but they were actually more into like delving into ideas on the other hand one reason they could do that was because there wasn't as much material to read I mean you could read the entire I mean did you or have I assume you use Lizzie Fairbanks catalog I don't know if you've had a relationship with them but that was the thing back then right now it's the internet but it used to be it's YouTube and the internet but it used to be an Amazon right uh and podcast everything has changed it's crazy how much has changed but Lizzie Fairbanks used to be the thing and I just it just seems like weird to me that like young guys don't even know this I don't think should know it if they need to know it but like and Brian Dardy's book I guess is a good you know thing that you could read to like get some I mean maybe it needs to be like a course like how to be a new libertarian I haven't realized like the last 40 years of what you're missing or something and without hearing people say in my day you know that's how we did it you know right but I have a sort of a different perspective I think because though the libertarian movement began as you say I had I go back a hundred years earlier because to me there were two libertarian movements as movements before then before our time okay there was the local focal movement which was basically as as libertarian as you can get if in a political movement in America there's never been a more libertarian group that was successful in any possible way than the local focus in the Democratic Party in the 1830s 40s and 50s and they had some influence and you read Legat so you know that he's fairly sound wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait not always he was sound Legat was one of the first guys who was really good on intellectual property which is amazing for his time because all these guys are totally confused by the labor theory of property and libertarian value I think or most of them right no one good on this issue but Legat was like incredible right did he die early or something or like he died like 43 or something he was a very sick man he was never very he's one of those people that would have in an uncivilized situation would have died young but then so am I we just have a better civilization now as far as health is concerned but he he died he died young now but there was another one the individualists in Great Britain especially there was an actual movement there I was just gotten the mail Wordsworth Donna Storps law in a free state which is you know a book he wrote in the late 1800s and he begins his preface talking about intellectual history and the history of individualists he says you know in the old days just talking just like we were right now in the old days he could count all the individuals in Britain they'd all fit into one room but now there are thousands and thousands of them and and he said it's largely due to Herbert Spencer he agreed it was largely due to Herbert Spencer so self-conscious and but also to the activist movements in Britain at that time the law and property league I think is one of them or something like that Liberty and property league one of those and and there was a few legal rights association individual I don't I forget the names of their organizations but they were important they were activist organizations all that was killed by World War One there was nothing that survived World War One well don't me yeah all right I'm with you I'm with you and so what I did when I entered the libertarian movement was not only read the recent stuff but also went back and you know right to the hundred year the century before because there was obviously something going on there I read Gustav de Molinari before I read most of the anarcho-capitalist stuff the exception well the exception being David Friedman what are your thoughts on him Molinari is one of those many very genius writers who is not translated in English very much so you and I I mean what do you think about sorry excuse me I'm scared what you thought about Friedman David Friedman he's a real smart cookie that's what I would say about David Friedman I've interacted with him a few times because you know he was a editor at Liberty and we had some Liberty conferences but he's a very interesting fellow we tangled every now and then he tangles on my blog he doesn't like something I write on my blog any comments and I respond and that's cool but I don't follow him and we're not social friends you know we're not even on Facebook friends I don't think we're Facebook friends so you know there's that I find him yeah he's a genius he's he was one of my big inspirations with his machinery of freedom but I met the guy at Liberty Libertopia in California maybe 10 years ago which I was glad to do but he just was repeating this stuff about Vine Neumann showed you can have interpersonal cardinal comparisons of utility it's like he just will never let this Chicago thing go you know which I think is just ridiculous but yeah that's probably yeah I just say they just don't want I mean they just don't want to all their theories are based upon this utilitarianism right like and if you shoot holes in it then you ruin their life work you know I mean let's say he's right that Vine Neumann who Vine Neumann showed that you can have what an equation a way to like sum up cardinal utilities and then and then people come up with these examples like oh the Austrians are wrong with their subjective theory preference because when you give a birthday present to your brother-in-law you have a feeling for what he likes I mean come on come on we all know that this entire attack on subjective utility value theories because these guys want to have an official approval of their government plans I mean this is what it is it's not funny it's not a joke it's not safe it's dangerous so so what if you show that Vine Neumann showed that there's a way to this is like these guys that opposed Mises in the 1920s when Mises showed that socialism can't rationally economically calculate and their answer was whoa you could have a supercomputer that could do it that was your answer like okay fine let the Soviet Union let Kim Jong-un come up with a supercomputer that's going to rationally plan their glorious future it's ridiculous it's all ridiculous yeah even if it's on theory possible it's not going to happen we know that which is sort of why honestly I sometimes tend towards public choice economics because I tend to think the reason we have a state is because it's inevitable because of the way human interactions work right like in other words at least at this point in our history in our human society you're going to have a state emerge because some people will start pushing for this and that and other people don't have an interest in fighting it and so it will just emerge right so it's public choice economics doesn't mean it's justified it just means that's an explanation of why it emerges right and you know Molinari worked on this somewhat too it was an interesting subject to him because he came up with this idea that we could do better than this you know that's kind of really what the anarcho-capitalist idea is and that's what we're talking about is we can do better than dealing with this Cluj factory that is the state because the state always tempts us to do horrible things that's one of the things about that state is always doing is tempting us to do horrible things and but there's a reason we keep on going to the state and one of them is probably because we're you know we're apes yeah yeah that's that's actually kind of my view I think that we came out of the trees too soon we're apes yeah I agree and so then the question is well there's two questions number one is if the state is inevitable does that have a moral implication right I don't think it does because I think that crime is inevitable too but we can always oppose crime so I I don't really think there's a lot of things there but then the question is if it's inevitable is it always inevitable or just is this a temporary period so I hate to be like Marxian but you know I think maybe Marx was basically right like maybe there's phases of society that have to happen and then no I don't agree with his final result but I don't know maybe I do maybe in the end we have a not communist but we have a post-scarcity society where we're so wealthy that everything is trivial right I mean is that really about the Marxian dream in a sense well you know that is a form of current communist thought is that really what comes down to it Sargon of a cat has even brought this up which is kind of amusing to see it done on the in the YouTube sphere but that is the idea that perhaps someday things will be so plentiful that the slave class the class that we exploit is the machine class the class of machinery and that's very close to Marx's conception of the means of production but I'm not really into Marx like that because I think he missed something really really important things and that's why I prefer Spencer because Spencer also had the idea of stages of society different kinds of complexity and he thought with industrialism came new challenges and new potentialities and liberty was possible at that point after the military the military kinds of societies that civilization pretty much started with you know one of the things you know as you probably occasionally see in various Facebook and on our discussion groups I bring up the great old megalith cultures I'm fascinated by really ancient history mainly because there's so much we don't know and they engaged in mass production to an extent that we still can't duplicate which is kind of interesting we you know we say that you know socialism is impossible because we can't meet the consumer demands because there's no coordination and there's no calculation there's no way that socialism can that a big state can do what capitalism can for the people is not possible but the ancient states produce things if they were states produce things that we cannot right now duplicate if we tried to build the great pyramid we would fail we can't even move the blocks oh oh I see where you're going go ahead so aliens no I'm not saying that no actually I'm not saying that I think we lost some knowledge that's been lost I don't know what that knowledge is and since I don't know what it is I can't say what it is what I am saying is that Mises describe capitalism as mass production for the masses but in ancient times they had mass production for the elites they had mass production for a few big projects and I think one of the big issues that people have is that we have difficulty making a distinction between big projects and capitalism we obviously the pyramids can be made so obviously we can have a social society obviously the government can make a bridge so obviously we need the government to make a bridge those things don't line up that isn't quite how the world works and capitalism offers a new kind of order can do things that are more amazing and we don't need the government for those things and I think that's a huge challenge and I think that we still have to deal with the fact that maybe they can actually do something politically maybe that this new form of organization which isn't how the pharaohs did it maybe this new form of organization can do everything that we want it to do but human beings are afraid because we frankly kind of like the pharaohs everybody wants to worship a pharaoh I mean I don't, you don't but there's a huge class of people out there who can't imagine a non-hierarchical society and even the egalitarians can't imagine it because they immediately set up hierarchies I mean the ridiculous part of everything that was recently shown in Seattle with chas they kick out the police and they set up their own police force yeah it's a gang but still yep I have nothing to add to that I think that's probably right to be honest but that leaves us where we were at the beginning is that we know that we have a new idea and that it can have really important effects in society and we know it works but we don't know how far it can go we should test how far it can go we're certainly going in the wrong direction if we're going back to the pharaohs nevertheless that shouldn't let us demean what the pharaohs did I would tend to fully agree with that I think so that's a big statement but I think so well it's not just what the pharaohs to me the pharaohs is a stand-in so the pharaohs are a stand-in for for what humanity has accomplished in the last what 10,000 years 6000 for our civilization yeah I mean I'm thinking evolution has happened longer than that but basically over time gradually humans have developed society and have developed what I would call recipes or knowledge right which we've built on and built on and built on sometimes lost sometimes went backwards but the knowledge that we develop as humans and that we accumulate is part of our cultural capital or whatever you want to call it this is I actually think this is the the explanation of our modern success is because we have so much knowledge about the world now which we've gradually stumbled upon right over time so yeah I mean in a way you have to say that Jesus Christ all of our ancestors from 100<PHONE_NUMBER> years before they lived horrible horrible lives and they kept struggling and gave us the information that we all use today and I think I mean I won't say a little bit of gratitude it's owed because they're gone but you know what I mean it's like appreciate where the information came from our ancestors gave this to us and if things keep going well I don't know if it will but if in 1000 years our progeny or basically immortal space gods is because of what we did and their ancestors and our ancestors and you know maybe if my son my son's grand child is a god someday maybe he'll recognize that he owes it a little bit to his great grandfather you know what I mean yeah but that's the sci-fi nerd in me that's the doon nerd in me I mean you know I don't know that's my only hope for humanity to be honest it's just potential growth right that was my kind of vision of the world until fairly recently when I realized that there are cyclical catastrophes that are astounding when I realized what the end of the ice age was like and how it changed the world I'm still reading from the information about that so where'd you get that from well all over the place they're learning about it now they're discovering the information about how the ice caps melted so fast and a lot of it outside of the academic world because the academy is like it's like climate science the academy is basically run by the same kind of people who believe climate science is settled which climate science is infancy they don't know diddly squat they build models you know like von Neumann that don't pan out but they're very confident and they use their models to try to get us to do things politically that's a lot of ancient history but in the next few years we're going to be seeing a lot of information filter even into the academy and even into the mainstream understanding of what happened 13,000 12,000 years ago it's not that long of a time ago but we had an extinction level event at that time that could somehow survive right and I don't know what life was like before that but it could have been very different than we think because the sea levels rose by 400 feet and we don't know it's buried 400 feet at the old ocean's edge so I don't know what life was like back then we're learning all sorts of things all the time like about the Denisovans years ago we didn't know that there was another species of human being on the planet now we do and we know that they had a huge influence in some weird way that we don't know exactly what that is but it's an astounding thing what they're learning so they may have given us civilization Denisovans may be responsible for the real impetus for civilization I don't know if that's true once again I don't know I don't look at the past and I guess I'm more interested in the past these days in part because I can't know the future but we can learn more about the past and we're going to learn the future as it comes every day but that's about it so I can make my prognostications but they're worth most prognostications I'm not a great prophet though I bet you had prophecies in the past that have panned out I bet you've made bets about the future in the past I don't know if I can stand out can you think of any? that's a good question because I honestly think I'm a pretty pretty bad of like I don't know the last 3, 4, 5, 7 president elections I think I've I got it wrong like I thought I thought Kerry would win you know I thought Jimmy Carter would lose 7th grader at the time or whatever but right now I think that Trump will lose but he won last time so it's crazy and plus I do believe that I think the elections will be totally mucked up this time by the coronavirus so you could have for example turnout that's like way below historical levels because people just don't want to wait in line for 5 hours I never vote anyway but I'm not going to wait in line for 5 hours to vote so a lot of people won't so does that affect the election this way or that way it's hard to predict so I'm not a good prognosticator so my here's my prognostications I think that the internet and copying and torrenting and encryption and cell phones and video cameras and all this kind of stuff they've kind of combined to deal a big big big blow to copyright law because people can just you can have copyright law copy things but people can copy things so the internet has basically dealt a death blow to copyright I think and we'll see that play out in the next decade or two I think I have a feeling that something like that is coming with 3D printing and related technologies for the patent system because if you can just print and make an object a physical object that serves a useful purpose to do whatever you want now right now it's all these little plastic things that are just like grommets or washers or spacers or trivial things that they're all primitive but if you remember and you're I think older than me if you remember how dot matrix printers at the beginning very primitive but they were like a revolution and then you had dot matrix and laser printers and they were expensive first they kept going and now you could print a book easily if you wanted to like you could buy a machine that would print a book right or just do it from Amazon or whatever I mean it's not that hard right now I think that 3D is still another level of complexity but I of course is going to improve so over the next 10, 20, 30 40 years who can imagine what in 40 or 50 years can be produced from a 3D printer and it's going to be a lot and that will undermine the whole patent system I think right so because I can't stop what people do in their basements or in the public library down the street so to me that's two good things like Uber undermined the taxi cab monopoly I do believe that technology will help undermine at least that and not just that other things too I mean the drug war is going to end I think we all know that gay marriage is already here the drug war is on its ropes right so all these things the state does are like gradually getting attacked by knowledge and honestly I think it's social media and the internet because people see what the government is doing and so they're scrutiny I mean you have people police are apparently quitting the police department right now because they're like I don't want to be called a bad guy so these things have effects so I have some slight optimism I mean I don't have short term optimism medium term or long term but I'm trying to have medium term optimism put it that way that's my view I get the I think I'm in your page on that one short term I'm not very optimistic I think there's we're going to be going through some real crises very quickly yeah mainly the left is going crazy and when when you have a third of the population at ramped up to 11 and also lunatic they don't have their ideas they're incoherent their demands they're insane and nearly everything about them is nuts so that's going to have some problems and how we it's not just that it's also the mounting federal debt and you know I mean like three trillion here three trillion there at a certain point it becomes a lot of money right yeah that's the lumen crisis in fact one of my thesis for a long time has been that one of the reasons we are going crazy is because everybody knows there's something wrong deep deep deep I think and I think this is something that everybody really understands but they don't want to it officially they deny deny deny I mean everybody denies that makes any difference right Paul Krugman says this is a great thing so it must be a great thing right it's a very interesting time we're living in and so it'll be fun to see how it goes as far as 3d printing and that's where it gets really interesting here's a technical Austrian economics thing I'm curious about this because I just used a means of definition of capitalism as mass production for the masses 3d printing isn't mass production for the masses it's individual production for the individuals it's family production for the family and it's a reversion but on another ramped up level so what is that going to do for the free order Garrett Garrett would say it's wonderful because he believes that's when that's when freedom is possible is when we have is when we can basically create things out of almost ex nihilo when you can freely transform stuff that's one of his thesis in one of his books I forget which one the worm aroboros I believe is a booklet that he did a long time ago and that's or it's just called a roboros I believe and his idea is that basically that's when we become free is that when we no longer are dependent upon the networks of people that states can capture capitalism is capturable that's that's that's the interesting thing about about markets is that capital is capturable by states well this is okay so we think about our word libertarian I mean the root word is liberty right and we talk about freedom and so that is the the guiding mode of a lot of people freedom liberty and that leads into the leftist anti hierarchy thing like oh well if I have if I'm supposed to have freedom or liberty then if my employer or my social connections or my church puts too many controls on me then I don't have freedom anymore right so it's this focus on freedom right I just wonder if that's like a misplaced yeah like maybe our word is wrong right we shouldn't it's just not liberty it's it's prosperity and cooperation right and so what does that require that requires property rights property rules etc um so it's I just think it's hard to predict what's going to happen I mean sorry I'm um I'm ranting here well getting the concealer rant is of course why we're here yeah I know that's your goal right I'm joking but I mean yeah some of the concealer rants are classic but they don't they don't hold up through time but uh I mean I had this goal that we can gradually as a human race increase prosperity and cooperation and tolerance and diversity and all these things that I think are good things um it's just I think we might have some hard times to go through to get there um to me it's just it's a question of a race between the underlying free market technological effects which are the good things on one hand um and the oppressing factors and the other which are always I want to see always want to be there but they're going to be there for quite a while right um but as you were saying um the trajectory the the trend line for that kind of that that sector of the society has a real bad element to it it's not solvent all of the almost all of the welfare states of the western world almost everything every place is insolvent they've completely leveraged everything and it doesn't really make any sense so I think there's going to be the real next big reckoning and how we handle that will determine much of the future well think about it in like historical terms I mean in a way we have a version of this in the US with this reparations movement like like so people are still talking about maybe we should have a reparations movement for slavery so we're talking like a hundred plus years old claims and by the way those are the only claims so you have Japanese Americans who were kidnapped and imprisoned you have Native Americans who are still to this day on reservations I mean if you open this can of worms there's no end to when you satisfy everyone's final claims and there's no one to satisfy the claims by the way I mean the wealth has been this this is what most people don't understand they think there's I think most people that think in these terms have a fixed total some view of wealth like you know they think that oh there's $17 trillion in the world and that's just all there is so someone has to have it and we can shift it around but that's not how the world works right right I mean wealth increases all the time we need to increase all the time and there's wealth that's been destroyed because of bad policies in the past and so there's no one left who can you know I mean to take a simple example you know if you if you murder someone let's say you owe their family $10 million or $3 million or whatever it is yeah but most people that murder people or not the types of people that have $3 million this is why we oppose aggression is because it destroys wealth and there's no way to get it back I'm not saying you can't do justice in some cases you can say listen the just thing to do be to do this but you'll never you'll never make that family whole you'll never make that guy whole you'll never bring back his life or what you did wrong and I think the justice system the legal system has to recognize this right but anyway this can sell just like I would say despairing but being realistic well certainly we can't remake the past it's a very utopian idea that we need to make everybody whole for every crime ever committed or in the case of reparations to African-American to make descendants of people whole for crimes were committed by other people to other people we're talking here that's all very utopian and it's kind of dumb the big problem with reparations is that so basically African-Americans demand more welfare what's destroyed them now and they want more of it I mean to me that's the biggest argument against reparations is that it'll do more harm than good they gotta get over it but the people who don't want them to get over it are the race hustlers I mean Al Sharpton and all the other Al Sharptons out there many of them in the media they really live off of having this utopian idea of rectifying the past well there's no real rectifying the past as you were saying certainly if somebody's been killed you can't get the killed person back and that's the ultimate rectification that's restitution and everything else is just some compensation that prevents a disincentive for future bad things well but if you have rectification I mean you can see rectification being done in a particular case by the person who did the crime they make amends they make apologies they try to do what they can they want to get integrated back into society and accepted you know okay I've made my amends but yeah the whole idea in a collective sense is total nonsense but the point is I think we all know that like so I think there's I don't think there's a coming race war exactly because most people don't want to do that and most people are not like that but if you force most people to say take a stand who you're going to side with they're going to side with their own people right it's like just let it go man I mean because it will never be enough it will never be enough because we can't give enough like the wrong and it's not just we it's like well exactly my ancestors didn't come here until 1900 so why am I responsible they're not responsible I'm not responsible just been living my life man just trying to do what I want to do oh you're a white kid of privilege okay that's fine but and we're already suffering from affirmative action and anti discrimination quotas and things like that honestly it's like and you know the race hustlers these guys they don't want a solution they don't want to give us a final bill and say if the American government just pays us $17 trillion we will shut up forever you know that's not going to happen either right so like what's the point right what's the point and the funny thing is is that the whole thing is weirdly racist as we all know because they most African Americans in America are to some degree partly white Barack Obama Barack Obama who allegedly has no is not a descendant of an American slave in any way would have to according to this racial formula he has compensation to himself he's half white most African Americans in America are white and so then we get into the identity politics and like oh you can identify but then what about like Nigerian Americans and Jamaicans they come here and they're like they don't want anything to do with being tarred and feathered by this broad brush of like I don't think they're like trying to say oh I'm a Jamaican I'm an Nigerian I should get reparations too like for what for who the ones that I know basically don't want to have anything to do with the African American government that's my impression too and I'm like so who is it so yeah you know you and I are supposed to have opinions on this because we're allegedly white males but I have a feeling like you and I are willing to have opinions on things we're not allowed to have opinions about because otherwise how would you be a libertarian at this point in time yeah well exactly well we've always been individualists of the obvious and really low order sort that we don't really pay attention to what our betters tell us we may not do we're going to think like we want to think that's just an obvious point and like you said your ancestors came in 1900 my answers came you know both sides of 1900 the Fond du Siacla the Bellapok something like that to go back to our original conversation and my people you know my aunts I have one of the great advantages over most Americans is that I can basically prove that I'm about as pure bread of one thing as possible or as in bread if you prefer to say it I'm very thin I'm about as thin as you can get and and so you know what do my ancestors do to anyone you know they were thralls to the Vikings probably yeah no I know so like the logic makes no sense right the justice makes it sense they could say you have white privilege that's all it can say you look white yeah I look white and I am white I mean to the extent that anybody's white but you know we're off white and blacks are off black you know true so here we are we've been talking for almost two hours now and we meandered but we had to catch up before we can deal with a real philosophical issue we had to catch up we did so formally I'm going to thank you right now and then I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about what we want to do with what we just recorded thank you Stefan thank you so what do you want to do with all this