Libertarian Round Table w/ Dave Smith, Larry Sharpe, Jessica Vaugn, Spike Cohen | Ep. 156
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PBD Podcast Episode 156. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Adam Sosnick, Jessica Vaughn, Dave Smith, Spike Cohen, and Larry Sharpe.
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About:
Dave Smith is a New York based stand-up comedian, radio personality, and political commentator. Dave can be seen regularly on “The Greg Gutfeld Show” and “Red Eye” on Fox News, as well as “Kennedy” on Fox Business Network.
Spike Cohen is an American libertarian political activist, entrepreneur, and podcaster. He was the Libertarian Party's nominee for vice president of the United States in the 2020 election, serving as Jo Jorgensen's running mate.
Larry David Sharpe is an American business consultant, entrepreneur, political activist, and podcaster. He was a candidate for the Libertarian Party nomination for vice-president of the United States in 2016, losing to former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. Sharpe was the Libertarian nominee for Governor of New York in the 2018 gubernatorial election and is again that party's gubernatorial nominee in the 2022 New York gubernatorial election.]
Jessica Vaugn is a political commentator, former playboy playmate, and Bitcoin enthusiast.
About Co-Host:
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Connect with him on his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: booking@valuetainment.com
0:00 - Start
1:30 - What is the libertarian argument
6:00 - Whos pushing back and debating-why didn’t Jo debate anyone
11:00 - Debates are about AD revenue
16:00 - Jo Jorgensen tweet/Truth about Libertarianism
23:00 - Larry Sharpe votes in NY-setting up actual policies
27:00 - What are libertarians
33:00 - Monetary policy
40:00 - Infrastructure of party
49:00 - Libertarianism as a religion
1:04:00 - Law & Order
1:06:00 - Should anything be illegal to sell?
1:09:34 - Bigger and Bigger superpower
1:22:00 - Saudi Arabia
1:25:00 - North Korea nuke South Korea
1:38:00 - Destroy military industrial complex/Be on the defensive
1:45:00 - Communist/Why hasn't the philosophy taken hold
1:52:00 - Major influencer for the party
1:54:00 - Forward party
1:57:00 - Borders
2:08:00 - Drugs/Abolish government
2:13:00 - 2024
2:21:00 - Socialism
2:25:00 - Fed/Musk
2:30:00 - Covid
2:37:00 - Fauci/Collins royalties
2:43:00 -Taxes
2:52:00 - Roe v wade
3:06:00 - Trump
I'm surprised if I ask you, like, if you put vanilla ice at the top, man, that's going to be very weird if you do that.
Anyways, folks, podcast is 156.
What number are we on, Tyler?
156.
And it's a special one.
We have to thank somebody for today's podcast.
I don't think with this individual, this would have never happened.
I think Spike, you know this individual very closely.
On behalf of the entire PBD podcast and the crew here today, we'd like to thank Joe Jorgensen for creating this unification of everybody coming together.
She had some nice things to say about you.
And we talked a lot about libertarians.
We talked foreign affairs, China, border taxes.
We had a lot to talk about that day with Joe.
And I said, listen, I put a question on Twitter.
Hey, I'd like to bring a panel of people.
Everybody was saying, you got to have Dave Smith on, you know, and I brought it up to Rogan.
Rogan was like, this guy's an absolute stud.
You've been on Rogan before.
You've been on Rogan before.
And Spike, you were the VP for the Libertarian Presidential 2020, right?
A 2020 VP.
Yeah, Larry, you're running for governor right now in New York.
Hold on, did Joe Rogan not say good things about me?
Joe, no, I didn't ask him about you.
Oh, okay, good.
Actually, your guys talking shit about you.
I heard.
Yeah.
You better do that live so I can get some votes.
Your stuff was like three or four years ago, right?
But we were having dinner and the interview with Joe Jorgensen came up because he voted for Joe.
And then that's kind of how it led to all this other stuff.
And you being a comedian, rock star, you explain complex things in a very good way.
And then we have also Jessica Vaughan here with us.
We've been communicating Bitcoin community, crypto community, libertarian community.
I said, let's all come together and see if we can do this podcast.
Appreciate you guys for coming out.
Yeah, man.
Thank you.
Of course.
So can I start off with just an open question for all of you guys?
And then you tell me where we're going with this.
So here's where I stand and why I'm more and more curious with what's going on with the libertarian argument.
So for me, I grew up in Iran politically, you know, mother-side communist, father-side, you know, imperialism.
He believed in the Shah and, you know, what he was doing.
And my mother was not.
She was more about the Karl Marx and what a noble man and communist manifesto, all this stuff.
So I grew up thinking, you know, rich people are greedy and poor people are lazy.
That's pretty much where I was at, right?
And I come to the States and I really don't care much about politics.
Clinton was the first guy I voted for.
I thought he was a pretty good president.
And then I went back and forth.
And then finally, I've been independent for the last 12 years, but I'm a big Milton Friedman guy.
So when you look at Milton explain, you know, the concept of being a libertarian, and he's done a very good job.
We'll get into that as well here in a minute.
I looked at the data and I saw the kind of votes libertarians were getting because we need a third party.
Ross Pro was the last guy that was able to create some momentum to get a third party.
In 1972, a year after the Libertarian Party got started, you guys got 3,674 votes.
John Hospers.
In 76 was McBride, got 172,000.
In 80, was Ed Clark got 921.
That's a big jump from 172 to 921.
Then it dropped to 228.84, David Berglund.
Then it went to 431, Ron Paul.
Then it went to 290, Andrew Moreau.
Then it went to 485 and 96 with Harry Brown.
Then 384, Harry Brown, again in 2000, dropped a little bit.
Then 397.
Then Bob Barr, 2008 with Wayne Allen Root, 523.
Then the big jump to 1.275 million, Gary Johnson.
Then the big jump to 4.5 million.
And then in 2020, which was like the perfect year to take this to 10 million with all the shit that was going on, with all the government regulating, controlling our lives, making decisions for us, it drops.
This thing drops to 1.865 million.
That's nearly 3x down, like 60% down, 70% down.
Dave, I'm just going to start with you here.
How do we create that momentum and then drop off in 2020?
Well, let me just say, as somebody who's both a big supporter of Karl Marx and the Shaw, I think that we have to combine those guys, combine their views and then project that onto the world.
Well, I mean, look, I think you have to look at why there was this big increase in the libertarian vote in 2012 and then in 2016.
And the truth is that I think a big part of this was what was going on in the Republican presidential primaries in 2008 and 2012.
Ron Paul kind of popularized and mainstreamed libertarian ideas.
And this led to a lot more people being open to vote for libertarian candidates.
And in 2016, you had the by polling data, the two most unpopular candidates in the history since they had been keeping this data in Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
And so there was this third option there.
And so that drew a lot of people in.
In 2020, I think that, and Spike can speak to this better.
He was more involved in that campaign.
I think that we did have a huge opportunity.
This is part of the reason why I joined the Libertarian Party.
I was just a Libertarian, like a Ron Paul supporter.
I think there's a huge opportunity there to kind of spread these ideas and get a lot of people interested.
I think we dropped the ball in a lot of ways.
And the lockdowns and stuff like that made it harder for doing traditional campaigning.
But I don't think we need to do traditional campaigning in the same way that we used to.
I mean, we have big platforms like this and Rogan and all these other things.
So that's what my focus is on, is trying to kind of spread these ideas to people because I think this country is on a suicide mission.
And the reason for that is that we've abandoned the principles of free markets, of limited government, of libertarianism.
Spike, we were, he kind of pretty much said it's better I ask you this question since you were going through in 2020.
But off camera, we were actually giving praise, not you, to AOC for AOC going out there knocking doors because Larry knocked on your door to say so that to me shows hustle when you look at Lyndon Johnson back in the days when he ran for Congress.
The guy was known as a BMF who was willing to come and sit down and tell you, I want your vote.
And that takes a lot of work to do, right?
Shaking hands, doing all that stuff.
You know, you were in it.
You guys ran together, you know, yourself.
And I saw the bus.
I saw the stuff that was going on.
What did you see?
What do you think was the missed opportunity?
And what was it like when you were talking to people to convert?
Because the whole game is about converting.
It's not to talk to people that agree.
My biggest concern with Joe was when I spoke to her is, how come you haven't had many debates?
She couldn't think about a debate.
So who's pushing back?
Who's challenging?
Are there people being converted?
I thought Milton did that.
But what did you feel was a climate in 2020?
I'm glad you brought up the debate during the Joe interview because, and I do, I think there was also a big part of there was a lack of messaging discipline when it came to, and this was something that I tried to do as much as I could, but I'm the VP candidate.
You know, it's not a 50-50 running mate situation.
It's more like 95-5.
So I did everything I could to talk about lockdowns and the mandates and everything else.
That wasn't the main focus of the campaign, unfortunately.
And by the time the shift happened in summer, where there was more focus on that, it was too late at that point.
And at that point, a lot of the lockdowns were waning too.
So it was no longer the big thing everyone was talking about.
But I'm glad you brought up the debates because the reason we didn't participate in any debates during the 2020 race was because the campaign decided not to.
Obviously, we couldn't participate in the Republican and Democrat, the Commission on Presidential Debates debate because that's a cartel and they keep everyone else out.
But there were opportunities to participate in debates with other third-party candidates, and the campaign decided not to.
Now, I don't know why that was.
They said it was because, well, we don't want to be seen as being at the kids' table.
1%, 2%, 3%, half a percent.
We're at the kids' table, and we need to take our position that we're at now, stand on the kids' table, and try to use it as leverage to get up higher.
That was a sort of microcause of many problems in the campaign.
We ran a really good campaign for someone, a candidate who was already comfortably ahead by a couple of points and didn't want to rock the boat too much.
But if you're trying to be a disruptive candidate who's presenting a stark contrast to the other two parties, that wasn't being done.
So when that is happening, how much of counsel is being, you know, are they asking you?
Are you guys sitting in a group?
Is it a conference call?
Is it a Zoom?
Are you guys talking to each other saying, hey, Spike, what do you see happening?
What do you see as the opportunity?
What are we dropping the ball?
Is that mastermind taking place or no?
The exact opposite was happening.
I spoke with Joe four times during the campaign and I was told that my opinions were not welcome.
What?
But let me.
How does that, how does that?
Okay, so who is there is a spokesperson for the Libertarian Party.
I don't know the guy's name.
I've seen him.
No, his name's Larry Sharp.
He's right here.
No, no, a guy.
You were until you endorsed AOC.
He's right here.
That's right.
But the question I'm trying to ask is like, who's leading that conversation?
Isn't somebody sitting down with you guys as a strategist and saying, hey, what do we is you, were you really the strategist leading that campaign?
No, you want to claim that.
Oh, I'm talking about that one.
I'm going to talk about that one before I get to you.
Who was the strategist?
I'm not going to went ever again.
But I have never done that.
But you know, as a person who's ran a business, as a person who's ran a business and for many, many years, as a younger CEO entrepreneur, I was afraid to talk about the problems that we had until I realized we can't do this shit.
We got to talk about it.
Let's get in there and talk about it.
So unless if we address that, we can't get past it to get to the next level.
So who, who was a, I think behind closed doors, there's got to be some strategists that are like, you know, to have some of the, who was that person for you guys?
There was, there were people called strategists, but not so much.
I actually had to build my own team because there wasn't a lot of feedback happening from the actual campaign structure, the Jorgensen campaign.
And what little feedback I was getting is we don't really want you to do anything or say anything.
And we're not going to be able to do that.
I literally, in 2018, I ran the biggest independent campaign of 2018.
We raised half a million dollars, which is a lot for third party, right?
My opponents raised $6 million and $12 million, respectively.
So obviously I was blown out of the water.
I built the largest team, literally built a policy library, which is still at lottery sharp.com.
Had a team that got me on Rogan, that got me on Glenn Back, that got me on all the shows, right?
Didn't ask me a question.
Yep.
Didn't ask me a question.
Actually, didn't want my team.
Larry actually offered my entire team.
Didn't happen.
I said, take my, I built my team out.
I'm ready to go.
Let's go do this.
Didn't happen.
Didn't happen.
And I'm doing it again now, which is why you said, who's the person doing it?
You're looking at the guy.
You go to LarrySharp.com.
That is a libertarian policy library.
You see what I'm doing?
And I am in the least free state as ranked by Cato multiple years in a row.
My policies have to lean towards a horribly unfree state.
So whatever state you're in, you can easily modify my policies and fit them in your state.
If they can work in mine, they can work in yours.
We're the ones who get out there and do things.
We're the ones who are making things rock and roll.
So if you're looking for the future, it's here.
I don't want to talk about the past anymore.
Well, by the way, I don't know.
I don't know the past.
No, no, it's here.
Oh, okay.
The future.
I don't know how New York beat California.
I'm sure those Cato guys have an answer for it.
Okay, so you said if you go to my website, here's what I stand for.
Why don't you tell the audience what the you run for governor of New York as a libertarian?
What do you stand for?
Let me bring up an answer to what Dave brought up.
The answer is popularity.
That's the answer.
I wish it was more that, oh, I'm the smartest or best looking guy.
That'd be awesome because I am both.
But that doesn't matter.
The point is, I have to be more popular is the issue.
Why can't we get in debates?
Debates are not about whether someone is right or wrong.
Debates are about ad revenue.
That's what debates are actually about.
So how do I know that?
In New York, when I ran, I was in debates, right?
I've been in debates with actual Congress people.
I've been in debates, and I've gone back and forth.
But there was a debate.
In New York State, we don't use a presidential commission.
We actually use the League of Women Voters.
And they had an actual official debate.
And in that debate, our governor said, I'm not showing up.
Why?
He was winning hands down.
Cuomo was the Cuomosexual.
Remember that was Cuomosexuals?
They all loved Cuomo.
He was going to win.
He's the best guy in the world.
So he didn't bother showing up to the debate.
So it wasn't televised.
So I showed up, Republicans showed up.
Two other parties showed up.
And I wanted to debate Henley.
And no one saw it except if you were there.
That was it because it wasn't televised.
So what happened?
The TV station said, wait a minute, there's a bunch of money to be made.
So CBS said, we're going to do a special town hall with just Republican and Democrat.
That debate was televised.
So if they think they can make ad revenue, they would do it.
Remember in 2016 and 2017, CNN was doing a bunch of individual town halls with individual people.
That wasn't because they cared.
They were simply testing to see how much money they would get in ad revenue.
If any of them were popular, they would then put them in the debate stage.
It was about popularity.
It wasn't about whether they care or not.
The goal of the media is to be seen and nothing else.
If we understand that it's true, popularity matters.
People say, Larry, how come we didn't get in the polls?
Because you have to buy the polls to get in the polls.
It's about cash, right?
So if I want to be in a poll, it's not just because I'm the official candidate.
I found this out the hard way.
I have to buy the poll.
A poll costs about $40,000.
If I'm raising millions, I'll buy some polls.
Every week, I'll buy a poll.
Every month I'll buy a poll.
When I'm raising half a million dollars over my entire campaign, am I going to be able to take 10% of that and throw it at a poll and maybe come in poorly?
Probably not.
It's not a responsible use of my campaign funds, right?
So you have to buy a poll.
Well, Larry, why aren't you in the press?
Why aren't you in the press?
Well, because you have to buy ads to be in the press.
If you buy ads, they then cover you.
If you don't buy ads, they don't cover you.
It's that simple.
It's all pay to play.
People get mad at me.
Why are you asking for money?
Because I have to buy ads so I can be covered.
So I have to buy polls so I can be in them.
Otherwise, you can't be in the polls.
And that's why people don't understand.
Third part, there are so many things stacked.
How much money did you say you raised?
You raised half a million dollars.
Half a million dollars.
Yes.
This is when.
This is 2018.
2018.
Okay.
So, so, okay.
So I sit with private equity guys and entrepreneurs will say, well, I'm going around and I'm asking for money.
And people are just not, they're not giving me the money, man.
If they would have given me money, I'll be able to build the next billion dollar opportunity.
Well, maybe the messaging or the product needs adjustment.
Yep.
And maybe the fundraiser, the person raising the money, isn't doing a good job selling whatever we need to get behind.
Because I like to take the, what do you call it?
I like to take the responsibility on myself and say, hey, if we're not able to sell this guy, our pitch is different.
So I remember like in 20, what was it, 2020?
Was it 20?
Yeah, 2020 when the election was going on.
Do you remember that one tweet by George Orgenson Tyler?
I don't know if you have it or not.
And all of a sudden, we get this tweet about, what do you call it, racism and Black Lives Matter.
And we need to be, so if you can make that big, it's not enough to be passively not racist.
We must be actively anti-racist.
Black Lives Matter means standing in solidarity with a morning black community as we fight together to end qualified immunity, police brutality, sentencing disparities, and the war on drugs, not support of any organization by that name.
Okay.
So to me, I see that.
And I don't know how you guys process it.
I'm going to speak for myself.
You guys can't say, Pat, you're full of, you know, you have no clue what you're talking about.
I see that.
And I see somebody caving in to PC community and political correctness.
Just kind of like, hey, beating you down.
You better agree with us.
Okay, let's throw this out there.
So maybe we can get some independent voters who are agreeing with Black Lives Matter.
Okay, let's throw so I can get some of the Democratic voters to come to.
Yeah, so that argument, then all of a sudden the people that are true libertarians are like, wait a minute, that's not what I believe in.
I'm out.
Well, I mean, I was very vocal and very critical about that tweet as well as a bunch of other ones.
It was just, yeah, it was just awful and completely tone deaf.
I mean, it's also like she said it while the longest sustained riots in modern American history were going on.
I mean, it's like, you know, like people were terrified in almost every major city across the country, businesses being destroyed.
And then it's just like, well, it's also not libertarian at all.
Libertarianism really has nothing to say about how you feel about other people.
If you are passively not racist, that's more than good enough.
We don't require anyone to be actively anti-racist, whatever that means.
The truth is that, look, I was very critical of Joe Jorgensen during this campaign.
I think that's why a lot of her people around her don't like me very much and why they gave her some bad information that she came and shared with you on the show.
But I think that it does libertarians, if we're going to look like to the fundraising issue before, I think as far as national candidates go, the truth is that Ron Paul at the time broke fundraising records.
Bernie Sanders then came in and smashed those.
And they didn't do it by going to private equity guys.
They didn't do it by going.
They're going to get $6 million on MySpace in 24 hours.
That's right.
That's right.
Ron Paul.
Yes, and it broke records.
And he didn't even set it up.
He literally just got into the camera and said things that people really appreciated.
And so what I think is that the role for libertarians here is that we're not going to out-compete Democrats and Republicans in terms of getting more money from private equity or big banks or something like that because we're not offering them what Democrats and Republicans are.
The truth is that if the libertarian agenda were to ever be put in place, big banks would make way less money than they make right now.
We're the party who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and make sure there's never banker bailouts again and that they don't have unlimited access to easy money and that they can, you know, like, yeah, I bet if I could borrow money at 0% interest rate and then loan it out to the public at 4%, I could do pretty good making money too.
But we're trying to end that scheme.
But what we can do is talk to the American people who are being ripped off by this whole system and get them excited.
So the problem with Joe Jorgensen is that when you're so out of touch with what's going on in the culture right now and you just say something like this that rightly by you is perceived as caving in to a literal mob, that doesn't get them riled up.
In this time period, while Joe Jorgensen is tweeting that, the American people, the government has perpetrated one of the greatest crimes against the American people in modern American history, which were the lockdowns, kicking tens of millions of people out of work with no legal justification, just under emergency powers, governor decrees, we're many dictators now.
It's illegal now for you to go to work.
And at the same time, they have raped the American people, just completely looted the treasury, and bailed out every giant corporation in the country.
It was like the most heinous crime committed against the American people.
And in that moment, to stand up and say, you know what the problem is?
You, average American, you're not anti-racist enough.
That's the real issue.
That's what libertarians have to say.
Just awful message.
Yeah, I mean, I lost all my income immediately.
I mean, I bled through my savings in about four months.
I mean, the closures, the COVID closures are definitely what red-pilled me so hard.
I think Joe's tweet is just indicative of the old format of libertarians trying to court both sides of the social, of the culture war.
But we're so deep into it now that if you don't know what you're, if you don't define what the DNA of libertarianism is today, like how do we standardize any type of messaging?
Because that's very contrary to the opinions of people on this panel that want to see libertarians move more to the right on these issues.
Well, and also, I agree with that.
And also just kind of knowing where your best potential targets, like I want everyone to be a libertarian, but I can also recognize that there's certain groups that are probably a little bit more likely to respond to our message.
And what you have going on, if you have your finger on the pulse of the country, is that you have a lot of people like on the political right half of the country who align with a lot of our views.
A lot of people who really are fed up with like the wars and the deep state, all the three-letter agencies that are fed up with the lockdowns that are, I mean, even after all, the Republican governors, by and large, were awful on the lockdowns.
We talk about like the two who were good, like DeSantis and Noam.
The rest of them all basically went along with the program.
And then you have a bunch of people who historically have been more left liberals who are completely turned off by all this woke insanity and are kind of leaving that.
So what you're playing to with this message is the people who, what, love the woke insanity and are left liberals?
Of all the groups, this is the least likely to bear fruit for you.
So it's just, even on top of it being incorrect, it's also just strategically stupid.
That's the part that works.
That's where I wonder, like, who are you processing issues with before you put a message like this?
Because you're speaking on behalf of 4.5, 4.6 million people that voted for this concept, this philosophy just four years ago.
Like, who are you strategizing with to say, let's go and do this?
That's what I was asking about Spike.
But Jessica, you voted for Obama and Oight, right?
You were more on the liberal side, Democratic side.
So what caused you to say, because everybody's selling their philosophies, what got you to the tipping point to say, you know what?
I kind of like what these guys stand for.
Just on Joe's tweet again, do you think that's indicative of the fact that she's an educator and we know how woke the how woke that went?
So being education?
I would just like to weigh in.
Joe didn't even know that was made.
It was from a speech that was written for her at the convention and they clipped it for the tweet.
So I just want to make a point that she didn't do that.
I don't know how Joe Jorgensen's never been on her Twitter, but I do want to talk about this.
By the way, what you just said?
Yeah.
What you just said, I hate to say this, eliminates her from ever running as the face of the Libertarian Party.
What you just said right there.
Because if you can't speak for yourself, I'm sorry, I don't want you at the White House.
And if you do outsource that, then it's your responsibility.
I'm not cool with that.
I want to know what you're all about.
So Pokemon.
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the protests and the riots that that sparked, there was an excellent opportunity for libertarians to talk about the same system that had unaccountable police officers that were doing those things, as well as that same criminal justice system that was letting people take over entire communities and riot and pillage and burn down buildings and homes.
It was a great opportunity to do that.
That's what should have been done.
That's what I was trying to do in my little corner is saying the same system that this group's mad at is the same system that this group is mad at, and we should be talking about that.
Instead of playing to the Black Lives Matter versus All Lives Matter, culture, war, good cop, bad cop routine, saying you're all being scammed and lied to.
The way forward is to fix these specific policies or end these specific policies that led to what we're experiencing right now.
And if we do that, then we can both reach people across the board.
We can actually have a moment of unification and we can wake up some people that are looking at all of this and saying, I don't think anyone is speaking to the actual solution to this.
When you go hard one side or the other, when you start using too much of the verbiage and the tone and narrative of one side or the other, you're signaling, well, I actually kind of support this side.
Well, if you're trying to get elected, then you're basically saying, yeah, I'm like this guy, except I'm less likely to win.
Or I'm like this guy, except I'm less likely to win.
But if instead you provide a stark contrast and say, no, no, no, here's why they're both wrong.
I hate it.
When I would get interviewed and they'd say, do you agree with Trump on this or do you agree with Biden on this?
And I'd say, here's why they're both wrong and here's what libertarians believe.
And that was the problem with that tweet and with a lot of other things is that instead of trying to provide a stark contrast between the Republicans and Democrats and how they both work together to fail us on this, instead it was, well, on this I agree with this side more and on that I agree with that side more.
Well, why are we relevant then?
Well, no, I want to touch if I can, right?
I got the most votes in New York State for Libertarian ever.
We had never made been an official party in 50 years.
How did I do that?
It wasn't by using any of this rhetoric.
It was by creating actual solutions that both sides could accept, right?
So one of the things I talk about is the MTA in New York City is a disaster.
And my nose see it's horrible, right?
So one of my answers was, why don't we lease out naming rights to bridges?
There are a dozen bridges in New York City, right?
So why isn't the George Washington Bridge or the Verizon Bridge?
Why isn't the 3M Bridge or the Kellogg's Bridge or the Pepsi Bridge or the Google Bridge?
They'll drop $100 million.
You want a value attainment bridge?
A value attainment bridge.
It's entertainment.
I like it.
Absolutely, right?
I would actually entertain it.
100%.
And bankers did.
They actually came to me.
In my business world, I'm a business consultant.
I deal with a lot of finance people.
So they were like, this is a good idea, Larry.
So we front-load it, 10-year, 12-year lease.
We front-load the cash, $100 million up per year.
That begins to pay for the bridges.
That takes care of maintenance.
No need for tolls.
Who pays tolls?
Working poor, middle class pays tolls.
The wealthy in New York City don't live in New York City.
So what happens is all of a sudden we get a solution and the wealthy pay more, which is what the left wants, but there's no extra taxes.
So it's what the right wants.
The left and the right are both satisfied.
I've got better bridges, more money coming into my city, and the working poor and the middle class are taken care of.
That is what made people go, huh?
I didn't say I was libertarian.
I didn't say I was Democrat.
I didn't say I was Republican.
I said, here's an answer.
And people went, oh, we're winning as libertarians if the person in front of me assumes I'm them.
And what year was that, by the way?
2018.
And you're talking that up to you speaking to the people about issues?
Correct.
I think you're wrong.
Tell me, please.
I'll tell you why.
I think you actually were successful for the exact reason that George Jorgensen was not.
It's because you're a charismatic leader.
It's freaking obvious.
You got some bass in your voice.
I like listening to you.
Here we go.
If you would, Pat, if you still have the numbers for what Gary Johnson did in Ron Paul and Joe Jorgensen, I'd like to just recap that because it's so clear what was wrong with Joe Jorgensen.
Do you have those numbers?
4.489, Joe Jorgensen, 1.865.
And what was Ron Paul?
Ron Paul was 431.
But Ron Paul ran in 88 in the Libertarian Party.
We are now living in a social media age.
Adam, I would tell you, I would tell you that some would say that Gary Johnson is also the cure for insomnia.
And, you know, if you know what that means.
I'm not exactly a charismatic leader.
Nothing against him.
I would sit there and I would watch and I'm like, like there was a moment one time with Gary in the 2016.
You didn't know Aleppo.
No, no, I'm just sitting there.
I'm like, give me sell me something and fire me up.
Tell me what we're going to be doing.
That's exactly my point.
You guys do not have a messaging problem.
You guys aren't going to bicker over what your policies are.
Like, she might be a policy wonk.
You guys need eyeballs.
You said you had a popularity problem.
The only way, like, let's be real here.
If you guys are trying to get from 2% to 5%, who gives a crap?
If you're trying to get from 5% to 25%, you need popularity.
You need eyeballs.
You need to be here.
But, brother, I don't know if you have that popularity.
You need a Kanye.
You need to go next to this guy.
I got Kanye right here.
Awesome.
That's what you guys do.
Why don't we do this?
Why don't we do this?
Okay.
Let's assume the average person, if you were to ask them what libertarians are, based on the fantastic job that media's done, they're going to say, well, listen, aren't they supposed to be like the crazies?
Aren't they like the whole party by themselves?
Okay.
So I think you're the best guy to do this, if you don't mind taking a moment.
Sell us on the concept of being a libertarian.
What is it to be a libertarian?
We're the people who are right about everything.
Well, listen, the libertarian.
That's the five-second version.
To me, libertarianism is, I mean, the philosophy is the belief in self-ownership, the non-aggression principle, and private property rights.
But we really are the believers in true Americanism.
The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights is a great way to kind of sum up what libertarians believe in.
And libertarians are the people who have been warning Americans for decades that this country is on a suicide mission because of our military-industrial complex, bleeding our treasury dry, destroying our currency, locking up all of our people more than any other country in the world.
The national security apparatus, the national spying apparatus, these are all of the things that we've opposed for decades and have largely been right about all of it.
And that's to me what libertarianism is all about.
And we can speak really to the issues that the real crises that the American people are facing.
To me, that's more or less what I, you know, in a very quick version, what I'd try to say were about.
Let me give you a question.
Can you do me a favor, buddy?
Just turn off your phone.
Sometimes some phones, Verizon especially, will do that.
Is that your going off?
No, mine's off.
Okay, so if you guys want to turn off your phone for whatever reason, I caught that a little bit right in the middle of my awesome elevator, pitch.
Verizon.
So if I could be clear, libertarians say you can be as liberal or as conservative as you want to be.
Just don't force your views on others.
Localism to where the government's job is protecting the rights of the individual from the local bully.
That's the critical aspect, how it should work.
If you say to yourself, I am super liberal, go, great.
Do you think it's the government's job to enforce your world to be more liberal?
If you go, yes, you're a Democrat.
If you go, no, it's my job through my works, through my example, through my community to make the world more liberal.
You're a libertarian.
If you go, I'm super conservative.
Great.
Is it the government's job to make the rest of the world more conservative?
Yes, you're Republican.
If you go, no, it's not the government's job.
It's my job through my works, through my community, through my example, to make the world more conservative.
You're a libertarian.
That's the issue.
If you're saying, I want to be me and you can be you, you're libertarian.
That's it.
It doesn't matter what your conservative liberal outlook is.
It matters that you want to force someone else to be like you.
Right?
In my state, New York State, it's a very diverse state.
In fact, Queens County is the most diverse county in the entire nation, the most diverse entire nation.
So I got people, say, in Brooklyn who will tell me Brooklyn is a blood type.
They love Brooklyn so much, who are very much anti-gun.
And I have people in, say, Allegheny, Wyoming County who think, if you want my gun, yeah, someone's going to die.
So they have that difference.
And guess what?
They're both right.
They're both right.
If you don't want to have a gun, don't have a gun.
If you want to have a gun, have a gun.
If you want to have stricter control, have your control.
If you don't, don't.
But stop forcing others to be like you.
Okay, so that's yours.
And then Spike, what's yours?
How would you present the Libertarian Party?
My five-second version is that libertarians believe people do best when they're most free.
Now, you talked about the media manipulation that libertarians are the crazies.
Libertarians want everything that everyone else wants.
We want good education.
We want good health care.
We want a civil society.
We want people to be safe or people to live in a safe society and so forth.
We've just recognized that having government control every single aspect of society is a uniquely bad way of doing it.
And that has been the problem.
Government got involved in healthcare, they're ruining healthcare.
They got involved in education, they're ruining education.
We can go down the line with that.
We recognize that the more local government is, the more accountable to the people government is, and the more allowing people to make decisions voluntarily for themselves and working together with others, the better off things are going to be.
And to Dave's point, the warning we've been making is that it doesn't even matter if it's Republicans or Democrats in charge.
When it comes to things like the debt, when it comes to things like endless wars, when it comes to things like the cost of everything spiraling out of control, it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and worse.
And it's not because of uniquely bad politicians or political parties.
It's because of a system that was built to keep the people that have power in power at everyone else's expense.
We've also had some pretty uniquely bad politicians.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree with that.
That's a feature and not a bug.
Jessica, how about yourself?
I think that it's the woke against everybody else.
And there is a great pool of Democrats that we could take that just think all this is insane.
And they're really harvestable people, especially Bitcoiners, that type of thing.
They're all learning about libertarianism because they never had any kind of way to even know what that really has meant.
So that's a very good point because to me, I don't know who we had on.
Was it Michael Say?
I don't know who we had on.
It was somebody that we had on.
We were talking.
I said, listen, my opinion is the crypto community is becoming a political party and somebody better win them early before somebody else does.
I think that party's for you to take, Bob.
100%.
So I don't know if you guys are going after that party.
And this party's not going to get small.
It's going to get bigger and bigger.
And they're right here in Miami.
We already have plans in New York State to allow New York State to accept cryptocurrency for all taxes, fines, and fees.
That's part of my policy, right?
That we can make cryptocurrency the norm, right?
So we already can do that 100%.
So I want to, I'm sorry, go ahead.
And Bitcoiners didn't really care for Eric Adams because he was like, oh, yes, we're going to be very pro-Bitcoin.
And then he did things against other people's rights, like making them do the vaccine mandates and all that stuff for masking in schools, like just very contrary positions to being a pro-Bitcoin person.
So we saw right through that.
We even want nuclear power in New York State so that we can actually create very easy blockchain mining, right?
We can make green blockchain mining.
We can allow that we can support that in New York State.
New York State is the worst, by the way, for cryptocurrency because we have a Bit license, which was the absolute scam.
A guy named Loski decided he's to run our financial agency.
So then he created this insane maze to get a Bit license, then left, and now he's a consultant.
So you have to pay him $100,000 to get the license that he created.
That, by the way, is legal.
It's just unethical.
It's totally legal.
I would also say just to the idea of cryptocurrency and specifically Bitcoin, that libertarians have to recognize how important this issue is.
Because this, to me, is like the most important thing.
In the same sense that hundreds of years ago, the separation of church and state was the most important thing that really ended religious wars.
You really don't have religious wars anymore unless there's governments who are in bed with religions who are trying to impose themselves on other governments.
And what we need today in the United States of America more than anything is the separation of money and the state, the separation of banking and the state.
This is the cause of so many of our problems right now, is that the currency is controlled by the government.
This allows us to spend way beyond our means to pull things off that we could never pull off if the government wasn't just printing money out of thin air.
The entire idea that we're going to go around and occupy foreign countries for 20 years in the Middle East with nothing to show for it.
Try doing that if you had to actually tax the people the money.
Try gaining popular support for that if every month people had to pay for the war in Afghanistan.
That thing would have been over by Christmas of 2001.
And so many of these things.
And the same thing with the lockdowns.
I mean, try maintaining the lockdowns if you couldn't just print up trillions of dollars in 2020.
There's no way it could have been done.
So this is really like the Federal Reserve and the money printing is the lifeblood of the Leviathan.
That's what we need to attack.
And that's why Bitcoin is such an incredible, you know, like has so much potential.
And those people should be libertarians.
Wasn't that the whole impetus of creating Bitcoin in 2008?
I believe so.
When Satoshi Nakamoto was like, I don't like this bailout drama that's going on in New York City and Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street.
And that's how he started.
It was essentially a cause and effect of exactly what you're talking about, Dave.
Yeah, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain, that's all libertarianism applied to a problem.
That is a libertarian solution to a statist problem.
So coming out of the bailouts and TARP and too big to fail and all of that, the realization that the central banking system that we have is basically a game of monopoly where all of you have to play by the rules of monopoly.
But when it's my turn, I go over to the banker and say, give me a trillion monopoly notes and stick them all with the debt for it.
What would happen in that game is exactly how everything is playing out right now.
You have a small handful of people who get richer and richer and richer because they have the access to the funds, the money that's being printed out more than anyone else.
The cost of everything is going through the roof because they can spend wantonly because it's not their money.
There's malinvestment that's leading to these bubbles in the economy, the real estate bubble, the stock market bubble, the student debt bubble.
All of that is because money is just being thrown around.
When you get government out of that, when you have the market deciding what money is, then not only do you not have the rampant inflation that you have right now, but you also don't have the rampant government spending that you have right now.
You don't have the endless wars like Dave said.
You don't have the cronies like Larry said that get to build a system for them to become a be a millionaire for the rest of their life.
All of that goes away because now government has to do what literally everyone else has to do.
Prove that they have value in exchange for the money they get.
That's what you do with your business.
That's what I did with my businesses.
You have to prove that you have value in exchange for money.
If you and I could just walk around with a gun legally and say, hey, give me all your money, yeah, we'd be very wealthy.
We also wouldn't provide much value.
That's the problem we have.
And Bitcoin was a perfect example of instead of trying to find a political solution to it, finding a market-based solution to a problem that is still affecting people.
And just on top of it, I think sometimes people have this like kind of attitude that like, okay, you're talking about monetary policy.
You're talking about economic policy.
This is almost in this realm over here of economics.
And then there's this realm of like social issues.
But this is like, it's the most evil thing in the world, man.
I mean, if you look at, think about, I mean, the way inflation is just destroying people.
And who's it destroying?
It's not destroying.
It's CPI right now.
Yeah, and I think if you actually measure the CPI the same way they measured it in the 70s, it's even higher than that at this point.
The CPI is all kind of BS anyway.
I mean, they don't really account for housing and energy increases and how, you know, if you're talking about measuring how this really impacts people, and who does it impact?
Well, not Wall Street speculators, not billionaires who own hard assets.
It's impacting people on fixed incomes.
It's impacting, you know, the retired and the poor and the working class.
And this government spending, I mean, you go look at like, I think it's, I might have this double check me on this, but I think 10 of the 13 richest counties are all the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
I mean, these are the people who are getting rich.
It's not like this is the bastion of capitalism.
There aren't big factories in Washington, D.C. producing everything.
They're just the politically connected.
They're people in bed with a weapons company that funds a think tank that comes up with a piece that we actually need to go send a whole bunch of weapons to Ukraine.
It's a capitalism.
And it's just doing their thing.
And this is like the real application of all this is like that families get broken up, that men put revolvers in their mouth and commit suicide.
That kids are like lives are destroyed.
This can't be removed from a social issue.
This is actually, and then you look around and you're like, why is the social fabric of this country like falling apart?
Why is everyone turned on each other?
Why do we have such low cultural standards and all of this?
This is all related.
This all like kind of came as a result of the government destroying the economy.
Well, financial sanctions too, or financial controls on people.
This censorship wouldn't have even been anything anybody could have thought about three years ago.
But now, I mean, I don't know why conservatives don't see that they can just turn your bank account off.
I mean, look what happened in Canada with the truckers or even as something as big and broad as like with the Russians and having the Swift payment denied to them.
You know, why would we give financial sanctions to citizens for what the movements of their government do?
Yeah, they always convince you it's going after this bad guy.
So it's kind of like, hey, we're seizing all these assets of these Russian oligarchs.
And you're like, well, was anyone like convicted of anything in a court of law?
And says, no, but we said Russian oligarchs, so we're just going to take all his stuff.
Or the truckers are like the bad people up there, these working class people who are like, and you're a Putinist if you think that's right.
And then you go like, okay, so they invoked these never-before-used Emergency Powers Act in Canada, and they're seizing people's bank accounts.
No due process.
No one ever proved that they were at one of these protests or donated to one of these protests.
And even if they are, I don't think they should have their bank account seized.
But yeah, these type of powers are very creepy.
And, you know, I think Americans are more and more waking up to the idea of it's easy to be like, yeah, but the government would never use them in that way against these people.
But also, we never thought the government was going to lock us in our homes for months on end.
But don't you think COVID and these lockdowns have helped your political party have a bigger voice?
It should have.
Well, it's helped me.
They've provided an opportunity for we have to actually take it.
And a bigger part of that is, yes, we have to show that we have the best ideas.
Yes, we have to show that we actually have a solution to this endless good cop, bad cop routine between Republicans and Democrats, where we just, things just keep getting worse and worse, whether it's lockdown.
TARP, the thing that sparked Bitcoin, the outrage was an 800, what was it, $798 billion bail?
That's pocket change to what they spend now.
They routinely spend bills that start with a T or end with a T. You know, it's a trillion dollar bill.
Who cares that?
$3 billion, $2,000.
$3 billion.
Yeah, exactly.
$800 billion is like a rounding error now.
And that's only in the span of like less than 20 years.
It just keeps getting worse and worse.
But the other problem is that libertarians, over 95% of voters either don't know who libertarians are or they see us as, even if they agree with us, even the majority of libertarians, self-identified libertarians who do not vote libertarian, the reason they don't is because they see us as a joke.
They see that they believe that we can't get elected.
And they think, well, why would I bother doing that?
I'm going to try to figure out which side this time is marginally better than the other.
Would you say that stat one more time?
95%?
Well, I mean, look at the numbers.
Like the highest we've ever gotten is what, with 3.something percent with Gary and Bill.
And that was in a time with uniquely with terrible candidates with Trump and Hillary, like unpopular candidates.
Trump didn't have the following he did in 2016 that he did in 2020.
Who's the most popular libertarian out there?
The most popular.
I'm pulling it now in New York State, about 6%.
No, but in the country.
In the country.
So his 95% people.
Who's nationally?
Who's nationally?
Who's the most popular libertarian?
Clint Eastwood is not vocal.
Eastwood is 185 years old.
Vince Vaughan is not vocal.
You got Rand Paul that's very vocal, but again, Republican.
He didn't run as a libertarian.
He ran as a Republican.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, you got Ron Paul, who is the OG, the guy that knows how to sell it better than anybody else, that he's, but he's aging.
He's not, you know.
So there's a few of them.
Joe Rogan could be conceived.
He voted for George Orgenson.
He's supporting the Libertarian Party.
But, you know, those are the names.
They don't have like a.
You need a face.
Please.
I'm the guy running.
Let me tell you this right now.
Let me be very clear.
We do have faces.
It's just hard.
We got guys like Shane Hazel running for governor in Georgia.
We got Mark Tibbetts running in Texas.
If I've never heard of the names you're saying, then you don't have a face.
We have Ricky Harris.
If I have to go Google Ricky Harrington, because I've never heard of, by the way, google Ranky Harrington tidbits is yes.
You're missing the point here.
I'm not.
I'm here trying to get this out.
You need a Tom Hanks.
You need a rock.
You need that.
Okay, but even if we're not a Tom Hanks or a Rock, we still have to show people how our ideas work.
That's not to debate the whole thing.
But clearly you guys know what you're talking about.
Please, clearly, you have great policy.
Let me deal with this for one second.
I'm telling you why they're not coming to us because we don't have the infrastructure to support them.
It isn't our ideas.
We require infrastructure.
Why would you run libertarian when you'd have to fight to get enough people on the ballot?
You'd have to fight to get on the ballot, period.
You'd have to fight to get signatures.
Fight to come up with a bunch of people who could support you.
Fight to find a funding base.
You don't want Libertarian because you don't care about Libertarians.
You don't want Libertarian because you can get a...
Are you saying that Donald Trump or if The Rock ran as a Libertarian, they'd have a hard time...
Yes, that's what I'm doing.
Yes, let me be very clear.
I'm sure behind the scenes, you're right.
But you would get so many eyeballs.
It does not matter.
But that's the difference between the two.
More votes?
Yes.
Would they win?
Absolutely not.
And another big part of that is the step-by-step process.
It is step-by-step, but there's another step-by-step process.
The majority of the people are not.
Yeah, but I don't know if you're popular enough.
I like you.
I think you're charismatic.
The majority.
You're not the rock, bro.
Guys, let me hear what Spike is saying.
Hang on, hang on.
There's one piece here.
If you were correct, then Michael Bloomberg would be our independent president.
He's not.
But why?
The system is set up to not work.
I don't think I'm going to save the world, but do I think I could be the guy who sets it up for the world to be saved?
Yes, I do, because I am building out the infrastructure, as you said, step-by-step.
Like we're not doing it.
I'm literally here doing it.
It is being done so that in 2024, in 2028, when Kurt Russell decides to come aboard or Drew Kerry, both libertarians, one of those two guys come aboard, we have an infrastructure set.
They're happy to do it.
Or whomever is the rock comes over.
We don't have enough to give them now, but we have to build up and we are.
And it takes local people building up local groups, local infrastructure, donor bases, PR bases, all those things to make that happen.
I'm sorry, go ahead, Spike.
Well, and the vast majority of voters, long before they want to, they trust a libertarian to handle the wars or China or immigration, they want to see how they handle their pothole in their neighborhood.
Like libertarians have won hundreds of local races, hundreds out of literally tens of thousands.
We've won zero statewide races.
We've won zero federal races.
One zero of them.
Yes, there's ballot access problems and everything else, but there's an even bigger problem, which is that most voters, even if they hear our ideas, they go, yeah, that sounds great in theory, but how's it going to work in practice?
We need to focus local.
We need to build an actual infrastructure for the party to work our way up.
Because if we get a Dwayne The Rock Johnson, will he get double digits as a libertarian?
Yes.
Is he going to win it?
Absolutely not.
Because people, at the end of the day, they're going to go, yeah, Dwayne Johnson, great, Rock, great, but this party, I know nothing about them.
They've never won before.
What would they actually do if they did won?
I'm worried about the kitchen table issues like healthcare and education and housing and the cost of living and everything else.
And just the fact that a very popular guy or woman is running for office is not going to be enough for them to say, okay, I'm going to break free from the system that's been running this country for over 100 years now.
We have to build the infrastructure.
So I think we need the Rocky British.
And that will also bring big names.
Why would The Rock bring come to bigger?
Let me read a super chat here from Hector Ross.
Larry knows what he's talking about.
Howard Stern openly contemplated running libertarian as New York governor, but backed out for lack of infrastructure at the time.
I have some feedback there, but I want to hear, David, then I want to kind of give you what I'm thinking.
Go ahead.
Okay, so I tend to agree.
I think we're almost talking about different things here.
I mean, look, if somebody like The Rock was truly converted to libertarianism and like, I believe this now, and I want to be like the champion for it, that would be amazing.
I mean, that would be incredible what it could do for us.
And so I agree with you on that.
But the thing is, this, right?
You've basically had over the last, let's say, 10, 15 years, right?
You've had essentially third-party candidates who ran within the two major parties.
So Ron Paul was a third-party candidate in spirit.
He didn't believe what the Republican establishment did.
Bernie Sanders was essentially a third-party candidate.
And Donald Trump essentially won as a third-party candidate.
However, the way the system is set up, in order for them to do that, it's not to their advantage to go to some third party.
It's to their advantage to stay in one of the major two parties.
What we're sitting here saying is that the problem is that that never actually works for what our desired outcomes are, which is really rolling back the state.
Now, Donald Trump, I agree with Spike kind of, yeah, if he had run third party, that would have made it a lot harder for him to do what he needs to do.
I'd love for that famous person who can move people by the tens of millions to come over to libertarianism.
But in the meantime, what are we supposed to do?
What are we supposed to do?
Are we supposed to accept that these two parties who have in effect committed treason against the American people and we know nothing's going to be solved from within them, that what we're just supposed to fall in line because this one is 5% better than the other one?
Like, that's not good enough for me.
I don't think anybody.
Well, my point is that this is the United States of America.
We deserve something better than that.
And so we're going to keep fighting to try to get this message out to as many people as possible to hopefully put us in a situation where we can get somebody like that or whatever is necessary to move the needle.
Look, I agree with you.
If Tom Hanks or The Rock or some crazy famous charismatic person wanted to take up the mantle for this, I'd be thrilled.
But since we don't have that right now, the best I can do is try to get on as many huge platforms as I can, speak to as many people as I can, build up our army, you know, metaphorically speaking, not a real state army, and try to make these views.
Yes, a non-aggression army.
Yes, exactly.
Well, it sounds like you guys need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Yeah, because I didn't know that about the libertarian infrastructure.
Like, I'm learning that.
We're all learning that.
But it sounds like you guys need to build out the infrastructure, but also get someone that gets eyeballs.
Yes, Joe Jorgensen's not the answer.
We all know that.
Let me give you a little bit of consensus.
But that's who your candidate was.
By the way, did you guys all vote for Joe?
Of course I did.
Yes, I voted for Joe.
100%.
They did not.
Did you vote at all or no?
No, I abstained.
Did you vote?
You voted.
I did.
Joe?
No, I voted for Trump.
Okay, got it.
Okay.
Thank you for telling us.
Okay, I voted for Joe.
I'm happy I voted for Joe.
So let me say this here.
So I'm processing everything you're saying, and we've talked about that before, and I'm processing what you guys are saying.
Here's what I would compare a libertarian to if it was a religion.
Don't get upset here.
I'm just telling you, if you were a religion.
It's my religion.
It's fine.
I would say you're like Scientology.
Okay.
They have famous people.
They do.
I was about to go there.
It's about money.
I was about to go there.
I was about to go there.
To say Scientology for the longest time has been trying to sell.
And if you go to Scientology, like in 2002, I was a guy on the streets going to every church.
I'm debating everybody.
I'm trying to go, what is this all about?
And I'm an atheist at the time.
And I would go to Scientology and I would say, so tell me, who is God?
Who do you think God is?
No, no, no.
I'm asking you, who is God?
Who do you think God is?
I said, no, I'm asking you, you're a religion.
You have a 501c3 under that tax code.
You're structured as a religion.
You got that tax flip back in the days.
You had great lawyers.
Who is God?
Who's God to you?
I went everywhere asking people who is God.
They couldn't tell me who God was, right?
I said, okay.
So whoever you want God to be, that's the argument.
Whoever you want God to be is your God.
Okay.
How about this?
Who do you want it to be?
Whoever you want it to be.
So the philosophy is very much about whatever you want to do is yours.
Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to do, right?
Okay.
You know, that attracted some people on whoever you want to be.
L. Ron Hubbard wrote all these books, Dianetics, and started with that and all this other stuff.
And next thing you know, Adam, that kind of counter contradicts the argument of having a big name because they've had all the big names over the years.
I mean, you can't get bigger names than these guys got, right?
You're saying Scientology.
But they haven't gotten bigger.
Their membership's going down.
It's not at the peak it used to be.
Now, maybe it's because of Miscavige.
Maybe it's because of whatever.
I'm not going to talk on that.
All I'm saying is that part.
Now, let me go to the other side.
There are roughly 200 libertarian politicians out there.
Almost every one of them is local.
You have Justin Amaj, who ran as a Republican, switched to a libertarian, Michigan, I want to say.
And then he's like, I'm done, right?
Then you have Jeff Hewitt, who is the highest-ranked libertarian.
I think it's Riverside County.
He has a job there.
And then you got a couple other guys that are doing what they're doing that are highly ranked, right?
Okay.
So to me, I think what you're doing is great.
You got to go out there and promote your message and do what you're doing.
But I think you guys got to get more grassroots on the bottom to get more people selling locally.
That's to sell people locally and then go to the top.
Now, what would help on your end, because yesterday I'm sitting there, I'm like, listen, I have a painting in my club room in my house, and a painting has Milton Friedman there.
I'm a Milton Friedman guy.
And Milton Friedman, what made him unique, remember that Michael Moore debate with Milton Friedman?
I don't know if you've ever seen it or not.
Michael Moore, 17 years old.
You ever seen this?
Was that really Michael Moore?
Yeah.
I've seen people say it was young Michael Moore, but then I saw other people be like, that wasn't Michael Moore.
No, but the people, that's Michael Moore who was debating the whole Pinto with all this.
He's great at that.
Milton Friedman is something else, right?
So he, but he was all about debate, right?
Okay.
Which is essentially a little bit of what's going on right now.
There's a little bit of pushback.
So I said, let me see how this guy sold it.
So the founder of Libertarian is this guy named Nolan, right?
David Nolan.
He starts in 1971, right?
Of the party, Colorado Springs.
So why did he start this?
What's his motive?
Okay, so it was inspired by the Austrian School of Economics, not Ludwig von Miesen.
It was more Maury Rothbard.
And that time when the party got started, it was because of four reasons.
One was Nixon, what he was doing, his administration.
They were not for it.
It's the Vietnam War.
Why do we have to do this whole conscription?
I think it's like when people are just getting drafted without a choice.
And then it was a startup fiat, gold standard.
That was a time where he kind of switched out.
Listen, guys, we got to do something about this.
So he created this Nolan chart and started going around to everybody and talking about, hey, left, hey, right.
You may not be what you think you are.
You may be this.
And oh shit, this kind of makes sense.
It's the smallest political quiz.
But you can get that quiz on theadvocates.org if you want to go to that quiz.
And it's easy.
Yeah, simple quiz.
Theadvocates.org, the world's smallest political quiz.
So there is an interview Milton Friedman does.
I think everybody has to watch.
One of them is Phil Donne here.
If you haven't watched a 45-minute one, part one, I believe, you got to watch it when he's talking about a nader.
I think he's someone nader.
But there's another one that I watched that he is being asked about the Libertarian Party.
So what's the Libertarian Party?
And he says, look, there's two ways of Libertarian Party.
I've debated Jaron Burke before.
I was a host at one of the Ayn Rand events that took place a few years ago in Newport Beach.
One, he says, is the Ayn Rand one, which is like nothing.
Everything is leave everything around.
And then there is the version that he is more for, which is, hey, you know, there's a little bit of a, you know, consequentialist libertarianism, he explains.
Then the guy starts asking questions saying, which one of these federal government agencies do we need to abolish?
Which one of them to keep?
Out of the 14 that he's asking the question.
Department of Agriculture, abolish.
Department of Education, abolish.
Department of Commerce, abolish.
Department of Defense, keep it.
Department of Energy, abolish half, put the rest under defense.
Okay.
Department of Health and Human Services.
It's interesting what he said.
Says, well, yeah, we kind of can, but we need it because of contagion and pandemic and things like that.
Department of Housing and Development, abolish.
He said, this one hurt America the most, by the way, housing and development.
Department of Interior, first you have to sell the land that the government owns.
Why does the government own all this land?
He says, should government have any land except for the buildings that the government works out of?
Everything else, give it to the people.
You shouldn't own all this land.
Department of Justice, keep it.
Department of Labor, abolish.
Department of Transportation, abolished.
Department of State, keep it.
Department of Treasury, keep it to collect taxes, was the main thing that he talked about.
Department of Veteran Affairs, abolish.
This is not FDA, CIA, SCDC, NIH, FBI, NHS, DEA, ATF, which ATF makes no sense.
Alcohol, tobacco, firearm.
What the hell are we talking about?
ATF today, and we got all these people working for them.
So that's how he sold it.
Then he said the government's role is a few things: preserve the peace and defend of the country, okay, which is defense.
Provide a mechanism whereby individuals can adjudicate their disputes, Justice Department, right?
Protect individuals from being coerced by others, individuals, police, and leave that at the state and local level.
So that's how Milton sold it.
Which part of what Milton said do you guys disagree with today?
Because this was nearly 40 years ago.
Well, all of that would be a pretty good start.
So I think, like, I am more of a Rothbardian than a Friedmanite.
I'm a libertarian because I believe in natural rights and I believe that government destroys people's lives.
And I find that morally egregious.
But I do think that this kind of consequentialist argument is important, also, that things would work a lot better if we left voluntary human action dictate them and markets rather than top-down authoritarian states.
I think that all of there's so much of the federal government that needs to be abolished that getting into like whether or not he's completely right about keeping the Justice Department, I probably disagree.
I think that could be handled by the states better.
In terms of keeping the Defense Department, I mean, there should be a drastic rollback of the military-industrial complex.
The Defense Department does not specialize in defending this country.
They specialize in starting aggressive wars for very specific corporate interests at this point.
There has not been a real defensive need for the Defense Department since certainly not in my lifetime.
But you really believe that?
That what military action?
That's 100% correct.
What military action has in my lifetime, has there been one war that was a justified defensive war?
Well, 9-11.
Let me ask you a question.
Well, okay, 9-11 certainly was a result of a lot of military intervention preceding 9-11.
I mean, the people who attacked us on 9-11 were people who we were sponsoring, teaching them how to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan and bleed an empire dry.
We then radicalized them against us.
And certainly, I don't know.
I don't think that's the angle I'm going to.
9-11 is a byproduct of Jimmy Carter's bad policies back in 1979 with the human rights movement that he had.
He asked the Shah to release 3,000 prisoners that he had, and the 3,000 prisoners that were released ended up turning into ISIS and all that other stuff.
So that— Well, hold on, but there's a lot in between there.
But also, Jimmy Carter in the last years, as Zbignou Brzezinski brags in his memoir, that they were working to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan to give them their own Vietnam.
And then in the Reagan years, we armed and trained what was the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which was Osama bin Laden and the same group of guys who turned into Al-Qaeda.
We then, under Barack Obama, sided with Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Libya, in Syria, and in Yemen, gave them a whole bunch more weapons and stuff like that.
So there's been, I mean, yes, 9-11 was awful.
We should have, in response to that, killed and captured the people who were responsible for that.
But we didn't have to do that.
But That has nothing to do with a regime change war against the Taliban.
We could have cleaned that up by Christmas of 2008.
You're saying we don't need a Department of Defense?
Not what he said.
Okay, you're saying that there's 730,000 employees of the Department of Defense.
Yes, we don't need the trillion-dollar a year empire, which we maintain.
What about the hundreds of bases all around the world?
Pat's closed 800 to be a China's got one base.
Close every single one of them and bring every single troop home.
We're not supposed to be an empire.
We are supposed to be a republic, and we have no need for our country, for our defense.
It does nothing to help the American people.
Every one of these troops should come home.
Protect our country, protect our borders.
That should be the role, if there is one, of the federal government.
So, for example, so this is where I want to kind of get into some of the issues.
So, if war is taking place in other places and a country is getting stronger by strong arming other people and picking up countries left and right, we should stay out of it.
Yes.
If it doesn't threaten our country, then but let's just say Russia.
Let's just stay out of it.
Russia picks up Ukraine.
Guys, don't do anything.
China picks up Hong Kong guys, just don't do anything.
You know, China's like, listen, we're big enough, screw it.
Australia seems weak.
Why don't we put a 10-year plan to go take over Australia?
Guys, just don't do anything.
Does that also mean as other power empires keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger, we just sit on the sidelines and do nothing?
Once they get to Canada, it's starting to.
The best way to deal with the China threat is to look at why China is a threat.
China at one point was a country that was starving to death by the tens of millions.
We have to look at why that actually happened, why they've gone from that to being arguably the second or possibly most powerful country on earth.
And it's because of the fact that cronies in the U.S. and other Western countries realized that the best way they could protect their market share of their various industries that they were in was to create such a high regulatory and tax burden in the U.S. and in North America and in other Western countries that they would basically shut out all the rest of their competition, create such a high barrier to entry that more disruptive, smaller competitors could not compete.
They did that knowing that eventually they would poison the water so much domestically that even they couldn't produce here.
But they were fine with that because they were already working to develop good, cozy relationships with dictatorial regimes overseas like China, and then use the U.S. military to protect their goods and services that they're making over there all the way back here to sell back to the American people.
That is the problem.
The root problem of China is that the U.S. and the West, the regulatory and tax structure in this country, I mean, you run businesses, I ran businesses, it's so high that there are people that are moving all their jobs over there.
If we made it more fertile ground for people to do business here, people are going to want to do business here instead of a country that's telling their company, you can't even criticize us or we won't let you work here.
We won't let you operate here.
I think that's right.
And I also think that, look, we have to be somewhat realistic.
I think that the hubris of the American national federal government and its spokespeople is so out of control that people have this like empire mentality.
So the question becomes, can we let China take Taiwan?
Should we let them do that?
You know, now, I don't want the Chinese Communist Party to rule Taiwan.
I would rather Taiwan be more free than less free.
I want everyone to be free.
The truth is that we cannot stop them from doing that.
And the idea that we somehow, what do you want to go to an H-bomb war and destroy half of the world and then they still take Taiwan after that?
We do not have an option to have a direct military confrontation with Russia or China.
Humanity cannot survive that.
In the broader picture, if you're talking about countries dominating other countries, I don't think there's too many examples where a poorer country goes and takes over a richer country.
That doesn't tend to happen.
It's a richer, more powerful country that takes over a poorer country.
Best defense against that is having us and our allies be as rich and powerful as possible.
The answer to that is free market capitalism.
That's how you produce wealth.
So you want to keep your economy as free market as possible so that you are as wealthy as possible and therefore not vulnerable to being taken over.
I've got a follow-up for you, but you want to say something?
By the way, I said Hong Kong earlier is Taiwan correction.
Thank you for doing that.
Go ahead.
You talk about the abolishing, abolishing, abolishing.
That also.
I don't talk about that.
Milton Friedman talks about that.
You were bringing that up.
The problem you have with that is when you say those words, the average American gets really afraid because what the government is, as everyone always said here, is a monopoly.
So there are many communities now, and the lockdowns taught us this.
They have lost the institutional knowledge to support themselves because they've been supported by government for so long.
They literally cannot support themselves.
So if you just knock down that government monopoly, they will have nothing.
And they are afraid of that.
Also, for many of these communities, they're in a bad spot.
They are kept down by government and employed by government.
So now when you take government away, they are no longer kept down, but they're also no longer employed.
So we can't just, we can, but we shouldn't just abolish government.
What we should do is support the community in supporting itself, right?
And there are policies you can do to begin that.
One of the policies I had is: if you are a New York State resident and you're going to pay your taxes at the end of the year, you can take up the $250 of that that you would send to the state and instead send to any nonprofit.
And if it's a local nonprofit supporting localism, it's 500 bucks.
And you might go, 500 bucks, how much is that?
What if it's 1,000 people doing it?
10,000 people doing it.
You can begin to support nonprofits locally, community, not government-sponsored nonprofits.
Government-sponsored nonprofits are simply government agencies that are not unionized, but actual local communities that will assist and get the communities up and running.
People do need help.
I just believe in my heart, and I think everyone here does, communities and families are going to be better at supporting people than some government agency.
If we support that first, then government will either go away or somehow get better.
I don't know if it can get better.
But it'll just begin to go away because community will support community.
And that's the piece.
We have to begin to support communities first.
So, okay, can capitalism stand on its own without law and order?
Oh, no.
Well, I mean, you need laws and law and order.
But I mean, look, what you need, but just to be more specifically, to be more specific, when we're talking about law and order, let's be clear about what we're talking about.
What you need is the protection of people and property.
Like, that's very specifically what you need, that people and their property need to be protected against aggressors.
Now, whoever you think should do that, that service certainly has to be done.
The problem that we have today under state policing is that they're always either doing more than that or less than that, right?
So you have things where you have gun control and the war on drugs and these kind of militarization of the polite and tens of thousands of SWAT raids a year where it to the point where like, you know, my friend Tim Poole, who you know on the Timcast show, he's been swatted like multiple times because it's that easy to just SWAT someone.
You can literally just call them and go, oh, here, they're holding people or they're killing people here.
And they go, and it's by the fourth time it's happened.
The police department isn't going, yeah, we probably don't believe you because you've already done this three times.
So we have this one thing where they're going well beyond protecting people and property and they become an authoritarian force.
And then we have other examples in a lot of these blue cities right now where they're doing less than that, not protecting property, not protecting, you know, not, oh, you can shoplift up to $1,000 in San Francisco or whatever exactly the rule is.
And that leads to chaos.
So what you want to find is you want to get as close as possible to the perfect equilibrium of protecting people and property, no more and no less.
So personally, I think private security does a better job of that than state police do.
So I'd want to see that expanded as much as possible.
So that's the right issue, right?
Why do we have things like, why is possession of a drug a crime?
Right?
That's a type of thing we're talking about.
Why is some activity that doesn't hurt anybody?
Why is that a crime?
Are these victimless crimes?
Is selling it a crime?
Why would it be a crime?
Selling cocaine a crime?
It is a crime.
It should not be.
It is a crime.
It shouldn't be.
Correct.
Because it's my choice whether I want to buy it or not.
I can go to the FDA and I can get a drug that will get me hooked on opioids.
Should anything be illegal to sell?
I asked Joe this question.
Should anything be illegal to sell?
Yes, there are issues that you don't want to sell certain things to certain ages.
Of course, you can have age restrictions on things to sell.
100%.
Should I be able to sell super EMPs?
Should I be able to sell nuclear to help you have nuclear power?
If you got the money, you got all the billions.
Maybe I'm going to sell it to you as an individual.
Should I be able to sell that to you?
If there's someone who can afford to buy a nuclear power plant.
There's a lot of guys today that can.
Yes, if they can buy a nuclear power plant and they want a nuclear power plant, they're going to get a nuclear power plant.
If they actually want it, they're going to go get it.
It doesn't matter.
And no one has – so this is a question that libertarians get asked a lot because we're against the war on drugs and the war on guns.
And so people will go to the extreme and say, well, what about nukes?
It's important to note that no person outside of a state or government has nukes right now.
Not because they can't get them, but because who else but a government would want to have nukes?
In fact, the entire nuclear energy system we have right now, which was originally built more towards the production of nuclear weapons than actual nuclear energy, which is why it's not as efficient as things like thorium plants and things like that, is because it was government leading the way on it, saying, well, no, our top priority is having nuclear bombs before they realized that it would destroy the planet and that they couldn't use them as freely as they were using them like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That wasn't going to be a new arsenal that they would use all the time.
But the point of that is, absent the need by a central authority, by a centrally planned authority to rule over others, there's not really a good reason to have a nuke.
It's not something you're able to use in any way.
Not a good reason to have a lot of things, though.
I'm just asking like the only question I'm asking.
I'm nowhere near.
I'm asking a question.
Wait a minute.
We're nowhere near this.
I'm asking a question because I'm asking the question to challenge the philosophy if there's a limit to the philosophy.
I'm not asking it because tomorrow I want to buy nuclear weapons.
Of course there is no.
So let me go to a different area.
Let me touch this piece.
This is common.
Well, then we'll all die.
We'll all explode.
The world will end.
Let's start having those conversations.
Let's start having conversations on what type of machine gun we can have or whatever.
Let's have that conversation, not whether I can defend myself in my home.
We are so far from what you're talking about.
It's on the planet.
I don't think we're far from what I'm talking about.
I actually don't think we're far from what I'm talking about.
We're living in a time right now that two to four years, we're going to have multiple trillionaires.
People are going to have money to be able to become more powerful than many, many, many, many governments and countries around the world.
But let me go to the other question.
That's my biggest concern, Larry.
And I really want you guys to tackle this.
Okay.
So 800 military bases we lead in the world.
Kyam.
We can probably go away with 90% of them.
Some say we can go away with 100% of them.
China's got one.
It's in Djibouti, specifically because of oil and the whole, you know, where they're targeting to control their oil, where they're getting it from.
Fine.
Let's set that aside.
But I'm going to go back to what I asked him.
And I actually am curious to know what you say to this.
Say a country keeps becoming a bigger superpower, bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
Should we do anything about it?
Or should we just leave it alone?
Say, guys, don't worry about it.
We're in America.
What do you mean?
We're protecting.
What do you mean specifically do something about it?
Like, what would you be proposing to do about it?
Say a little guy calls and says, hey, man, Dave, I need your help, bro.
They're about to take my ass out.
Should you say, dude, it's not my business, man.
I'm handling my own business here.
I look at it like this, right?
So I, personally, I would never advocate for a war that I wasn't willing to fight and die in myself.
And so in the same sense of like, if I, you know, if you were saying there's children, you know, in your neighborhood somewhere who are at risk, would I risk my children in order to go help them?
The answer is almost certainly no.
And that's just, I don't mean to be cold about it.
It doesn't mean that I don't have any sympathy for those kids, but my first priority in life is protecting my children.
And I kind of look at that extended out.
Now, the bottom line is we are not supposed to be an empire.
We're supposed to be a republic.
If another country does want to become an empire, which I also think the truth is that we are by far still the richest country in the world, and we can't afford the empire that we're maintaining.
We're $30 trillion in debt trying to maintain this empire.
I don't think there's any other country who could really maintain it for long.
That doesn't mean they can't squash some of their smaller neighbors along the way.
I think that it would be reasonable to do everything in our power to try to negotiate a peaceful solution to a problem.
So with Russia and Ukraine right now, forget all the meddling that the United States of America has done to help create this mess.
I would not have a problem with a massive diplomacy effort right now to say, hey, we need to reach a deal to have a ceasefire here.
Vladimir Putin's going to get a little bit of what he wants.
He's not going to get everything he wants.
Let's try to end the war.
Let's try to end the bloodshed.
Should we go to war to defend one of these other countries?
I think if you want to strap on a helmet and a pair of boots and grab a gun and go over there and help them, more power to you, brother.
I wouldn't stop you from doing it.
But again, should we force the American taxpayer to pay for this, especially when our own country is falling apart?
Absolutely not.
So in other words, what you're saying is, let me restate this one more time.
If China keeps picking up pieces on the puzzle, smaller countries, and they're bullying them, and Russia is doing that, as long as we're sitting here and it's not affecting us at all, we should just leave them alone.
We shouldn't do anything to those guys.
Again, I don't know if I'd say we shouldn't do anything.
I mean, like, I think you can condemn people.
You can try to present them.
They don't care about condemning.
That doesn't bother to be a lot of people.
No, I'm not saying that that's going to stop.
But you just use the words literally do anything.
If you're talking about should we go to war with nuclear-armed countries for other countries, no, I don't agree with that.
Okay, so let's say, let's say, let's say, guys, this has been going on for a long time.
Let's say they go and all of a sudden, out of the 200 countries that we have, okay, whenever numbers, 195 to 205, it changes.
Let's say it's 200.
Out of the 200 countries that we have, all of a sudden we're down to 180, 160, 140, 120, 100, 60, 50.
You're okay if there's only 20 countries in the world and one of them becomes a superpower because it can be a lot of people.
I'm certainly not okay with it.
Let me just say, I'm certainly not okay with it.
But in the same time, I almost feel like this mentality, it's like you're in a marriage and your marriage is falling apart.
And you're sitting here worrying about the marriage down the block and going like, oh, I think their marriage is really on the rock.
Well, I'm saying our country is falling apart.
And it's because we've tried to be the empire of the world.
Let me give you an actual answer.
This is all this.
I'm the policy guy.
Let me give you, I'm not the theory guy, right?
This theory guys, I'm going to give you actual policy in two things.
How do you destroy the military industrial complex and bring the empire back?
And then how do you handle that what you just said?
Let me first touch the military industrial complex.
The military industrial complex, why we have the empire, is because of money.
That's the only reason why.
We have a bunch of contractors who literally make trillions of dollars on these things.
What we must do is we have to immediately end all hot wars.
All of them end.
Bring those troops back to bases that we currently have and/or to the states.
Allow their normal contracts to end.
You do not discharge them immediately.
I know some terrorist says that's a terrible idea.
You can't discharge a million troops in America with no jobs and break all their contracts.
You don't do that.
You said, we don't allow re-enlistments.
So you allow their contracts to end and they know in advance because people plan their families around this.
Hey, you're not going to re-enlist.
Plan your life around this.
Two years, you're going to be out or whatever the case, or limit re-enlistments.
This brings our military service down.
That's number one.
Number two, all the countries that we're now deciding that we're not going to trade with, open up trade with all of them.
North Korea, Cuba, Iran, all of that.
Open up trade completely and give preferred treatment, which makes some libertarians unhappy, but I still say it, with the military industrial complex, to not give them weapons, but to give them trucks and computers and whatever.
The military industrial complex doesn't want to kill people.
It just doesn't care.
It wants to sell stuff and make money.
So give them the opportunity to sell stuff and make money, not killing people.
They will begin to transfer to do that.
While you do that, you slowly begin to look at every single agreement we have with these bases.
Some are SOFA agreements, some are alliance agreements, and you look at all of the deals.
All of them have some out contract, whether it's time or things happen, and you let every one of those out.
You get out of every single one of those bases as the agreement.
So you don't want to break your contracts, but all the contracts have ways of getting us out.
Within 10 years, you will have almost every base removed, with the exception of those that are required to protect trade routes.
I think we should retain bases with our naval forces that protect trade routes.
Besides that, bring all the troops home.
Let them go away.
Now, how do I stop when someone's grabbing all these countries?
No one's grabbing those countries.
That scenario you made up is a total fantasy.
Countries.
You have to be naive to say that.
You have to be naive to say that.
No, Russia has to be afraid of the country.
You have to be naive to say that, Larry.
Russia can't take Ukraine.
How naive of a statement is that?
What do you mean?
There are more countries.
What is happening?
What's ever had?
So you're telling me there is no countries that want to take over other countries.
I didn't say that.
You said 200 to 50.
No way.
I said, it's never going to happen.
Do you own a life insurance policy?
I do.
Why do you own it?
Because I'm going to die one day.
Okay.
So do you own it because you're going to die tomorrow?
Maybe.
One day I'm going to die.
But you're going to die tomorrow.
Maybe.
You're going to die the next day.
Maybe today.
Maybe today.
But do you know?
Larry, let's not go out like that.
You never know.
But I dropped that right now.
But do you know?
I don't do that, Larry.
Do you know?
No, I know.
Okay.
Do you have an upshot agreement?
Do I have no idea?
Do you have a state planning?
Do you have a leading trust?
Do you have a will?
Okay.
So for me, the only thing, and by the way, the military-industrial complex, nobody disagrees with that.
Nobody on the left or the right or the middle disagree.
And those who do, they're involved.
Correct.
Nobody disagrees with that part.
Let's set that part aside.
All I'm saying is the argument to think that all these other guys are going to sit there and say, okay, for example, how come Russia didn't invade Ukraine under Trump?
How come you said?
I'm going to be clear on this.
No, but you said that you're not allowing me to make a problem.
I'm going down to 20 countries.
I am saying that because that to me is I have to have a life insurance policy against that happening.
And if I don't have an insurance policy against that, somebody will take advantage of it.
It's called nuclear weapons.
We have an insurance company.
So that's nuclear weapons.
That is defense.
Of course.
So you need a major defense so the enemy knows to not screw with your country.
But there is a big but that we're going with here.
And I want to get Spike's feedback on this.
This is the one part that we haven't yet, you still haven't addressed, okay?
If a smaller guy, smaller country is being bullied by a bigger one, a Putin or regime, or any one of these guys, and they're going and imposing themselves on them.
Yep.
Should we sit on the sidelines and not do anything about this?
Sorry, I need to answer.
So the United States military industrial, and I know you're saying that no one agrees with that, but that's what we have.
So when you're saying do something, that's the thing we have.
You know, they literally say fight with the army you have.
The army we have spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to replace the Taliban, which they helped to create, with a better armed Taliban that now has the support of the majority of Afghanistan people.
So that's the problem.
They spent over a trillion dollars, not tens of billions of dollars.
Just on the military officers.
We left $83 billion of equipment for those guys.
$83 billion.
That's a lot of equipment.
When you're saying do something, that's the system we have.
What's much better is to look at why China and these other countries are potential threats to begin with.
Quick, quick poll here.
Anyone raise your hands who think that state communism is a great way to run a country and that it will become a powerful empire as a result of communism?
Exactly.
No one thinks that.
The reason it's set up that way is because the other powerful economies are intentionally choking themselves off so that a small handful of cronies in those countries can have a controlled market where they are the ones that control the market by having control of the labor and the production, which is controlled in China.
And China's benefiting from that.
You just had the G20 countries.
Every year, the G8 or G7 now, because they kicked Russia out, but all the major economies get together and they talk about things like minimum, global minimum taxes.
And they talk about things like climate change controls.
And they talk about all these different regulations and taxes.
And they all congratulate each other on it.
And China is completely left out of it.
And they sit there and go, that looks great.
We're going to continue to have the most competitive economy because these countries are intentionally choking themselves off.
And they're not doing it because they're stupid.
They're doing it because the cronies that put those politicians in place in all of those countries are benefiting from that.
They benefit.
They make the billions.
They deal with not having to have nearly as many competitors.
And China's just sitting there and reaping the whirlwind from it.
If we get rid of that, if we do deregulation here, you're going to see masses of jobs come back.
Or honestly, a lot of them will just wither on the vine there and be replaced with much better businesses and more disruptive industries here as a result of that.
And so now China will have to sit there and say, okay, do we want to be a communist regime that is now falling apart because the U.S. isn't choking itself off economically?
Or do we have to create an actual free market?
Or do we need to have a freer market so that we can actually feed our people?
They're not even going to be thinking about empire.
They're going to be thinking about how they don't go back to starving to death by the tens of millions.
Yeah, I would recommend this is, first off, I would recommend people read David Stockman.
You know who David Stockman is?
He was Reagan's budget director.
He's a brilliant guy.
I haven't read the book, but I wouldn't.
Well, he wrote a couple of great books.
The Great Deformation was incredible.
I recommend people read that.
But I'm talking more about his articles that he's been writing about China.
He's completely convinced that China is in a huge bubble.
This is not, that they're going to have a huge crash coming up.
Now, I'm not, I don't know what's been saying that for 30 years.
Yeah.
Well, okay, maybe they're wrong.
I'm just saying that is another possibility here, too.
I mean, they really have, like, if you think what our Fed is doing is crazy, I mean, they're really like a ghost economy in a sense.
That being said, though, I don't think, I don't think it's like impractical that bigger countries are going to squash little countries.
And of course, I think this has been happening for all of human history.
This happens all around the globe.
And I think there are a lot of people who, you know, get innocent people who get crushed in that process.
I think that the difference between your hypothetical and a spike is talking about like what we really are living in.
So I guess theoretically, if you made America the kind of benevolent good guys who some big country was trying to impose their will on some small country, shouldn't we be the good guys in this fight, kind of like disinterested, and come in and say, hey, no, big guy, you don't get to impose your will on the small guy.
Perhaps in theory, in reality, we are the big guy who imposes our will on the small guy.
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is the United States of America's federal government.
Over the last 25 years in the 21st century, there is no question.
You look at the hundreds of thousands.
If you add up the war in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, in Somalia, what we've done, we're in the millions of innocent people who have been killed as a result of our wars.
Perhaps we are not in the position to claim that we are the guy who stands up for the little guy being bullied by the big guy.
No, that's not why we're on the side of Ukraine.
That's not why we're on the side of Hong Kong.
That has nothing to do with any of it.
This is strategic interest from very interested people who are blood-soaked monsters, who don't have anything to say about the hundreds of thousands of people being slaughtered in Yemen right now as babies starve to death in Yemen.
That war in Yemen could be ended with a phone call from the president of the United States telling Saudi Arabia we will not tolerate this war of genocide going on.
And they don't pick up the phone to make that call because they're benefiting from that partnership with Saudi Arabia.
This is not humanitarian impulses do not drop U.S. horror policy.
We will not tolerate.
Unpack the meaning of we will not tolerate.
What do you mean we will not tolerate?
If you were look, Saudi Arabia and the United States of America have been in a partnership since the 70s.
And they're both, and Saudi Arabia is, they need that partnership with the United States of America.
Obama literally said, and you can Google this and check it out, to placate the Saudis, he helped them launch the war in Yemen.
We were refueling their fighter jets for the first seven years of this war, a war of genocide, where people are dying by the hundreds of thousands.
When this is all said and done, I bet you it's over a million people who died in the war in Yemen once they get the real numbers, including the like cholera outbreaks and all of that stuff.
This is the poorest country in the Middle East, Yemen, before the war.
The poorest country there, poorer than the poorest people we've ever met in our lives, people who live in the United States of America.
They continued it all the way through the Trump administration.
Biden promised he was going to end it.
They've been escalating it.
What does that mean?
My point is that they could, if the United States of America put serious pressure on the Saudis, said, listen, no more weapons, no more deals unless you find an end to this war.
There's no question that they could end this thing.
They could have ended it by just never starting it under Barack Obama.
They could have ended it by Donald Trump coming in there and just not, but Donald Trump was like, oh, we're selling a bunch of weapons to the Saudis.
This is great business.
So he kept it going.
But I'm just saying, if we really want to be humanitarians and we really want to stop a bigger country from bullying a smaller country, well, you've got a bigger country in Saudi Arabia committing genocide against a smaller country in Yemen where we have tremendous influence over them.
It'd be much easier to stop that than to stop Russia or China.
Let's start small.
Go do it one time.
And then maybe I'll believe that the U.S. federal government is in the business of protecting the small from the big.
I'll give you an answer.
You ask what that means.
As I said, you retain protection of trade routes.
So people stop doing things you don't like.
Don't protect their trade routes.
It's again, non-compliance can still make it happen.
Not trading can be something you can do.
If we are, as Dave says, the most powerful if we have to.
But you just said open trade for everybody.
You just said open trade for North Korea, Iran for everybody.
Who's North Korea invading?
What little guy are they invading?
Nobody.
But if you're worried about a big guy invading someone, if that's your concern, there are other things we can do besides war.
Do you think South Koreans go to sleep good at night?
100%.
I bet they're not.
No, but not.
I learned not there.
But nothing they're not worried about the guy by the way.
No, but they're worried about nukes.
I mean, they're not worried about North Korea.
They're not invading South Korea.
They're worried about them launching a nuke.
That's a part of it, though.
It isn't.
That's a fear, though.
No, I think that's a fear.
Yes, you have a nuclear-armed bad man.
But the fear is not.
North Korea is too poor.
It's true.
South Koreans are at North Kansans in New York.
But go there.
Go there and say, North Korea nuke South Korea.
What should we do?
Wow.
You just go to places like that.
Why in the world would North Korea nuclear items?
Guys, all I'm – listen.
They're Koreans.
I'm a – as a person who was just thinking from the – we have a guy right now that the conversation – I had yesterday, two days ago.
We have Peter Pryor here, Dr. Peter Pryor.
I don't know if you know who he is.
He is the leading expert for weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons and super EMPs.
And, you know, experts are saying if they drop a super EMP, 70% of America is going to die within 30 days.
Sure.
This is a reality.
And so there's a lot of shit going on today.
So for me to sit there and say, guys, don't worry about it.
It's going to be chill.
Nothing's going to happen.
No, no, no.
That's not what I'm saying.
I don't know where you're going with that.
I just ask you a simple question.
You're telling me Aman.
What if a nuclear?
Because it could happen.
Everything could happen.
This is not everything, though.
Well, then I'm from Iran, buddy.
This is not coming from a guy that's like we're living in a land in America where there's no wars here.
Is somebody nuke Iran?
Half a million people died between them and Iraq.
I'm not sure what to do with that.
By the way, because the United States was funding and supporting both sides.
We would give money to both sides in that war.
If North Korea today.
Okay, so let me go back to what you said.
You said something here.
You said, well, if we take this route and, you know, here's what's going to be happening and, you know, they're going to see us as the good guy saying, hey, guys, don't do this, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay.
If your last name is Trump, when you go to school, but you're not Donald Trump, but your last name is Trump.
If you go somewhere, you're going to school or you're doing business, you introduce yourself as, hi, I'm Baron Trump.
Are you going to be judged?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
If your last name is Kennedy and say, hi, I'm Robert Kennedy Jr.
Are you going to be judged?
True, of course.
Your last name is Clinton.
I'm Chelsea Clinton.
How are you?
Do you immediately go to, uh-oh, I'm dealing with a Trump, a Kennedy, or a Clinton?
Yes.
Okay.
If you are representing a country whose name is the United States of America and you're going to say, listen, guys, we've changed.
We're nice people now.
But that's we don't, you know, we don't want to do this anymore.
Let's just kind of kick it and let's have a good relationship together and let's do this.
Say you change.
Say we change philosophically, dramatically, to go to a libertarian philosophy.
I see the only way that works if everybody is joining that camp.
China's going to say, good for you guys.
Go ahead.
Russia's going to say, okay, awesome.
Nice people.
Your current system means in about four to eight years, New Guy's going to take over what you're doing right now, and he's going to go back to whatever was in the past before.
The dystopian future is happening now.
You're acting like this is some future.
The Chinese right now are dominating us in places like Africa and Southeast Asia because we are wasting our time fighting wars in Afghanistan.
They love it.
Listen, they love it.
They love what we're doing.
See, here's the thing.
Well, let me just say, okay, there's two errors here that you can control for, right?
And I think you're focusing on one and not the other.
And the other is more the reality of the situation right now.
So you can make the argument that if we kind of back off, that that's less of a disincentive for other people to take over because they don't think we're going to be as forceful or strong.
What's actually going on more in reality right now is that we are provoking a lot of these other countries into some of their actions.
I mean, look, we expanded NATO all the way up to the Russian border, and then we're shipping in money, weapons and money, and also were instrumental in a Ukrainian coup in 2014, all before Vladimir Putin ended up invading.
I don't think the lesson here is necessarily that, oh, if we back off, he's going to invade.
We also might provoke him by going further.
And I think this could be, okay, fine.
Poland today said that they were considering joining NATO.
Right, so this is on the right.
Now things are escalating higher and higher rather than what we want, which is to de-escalate the situation, okay?
So on top of that, look, do you honestly think, let's think about this.
Does Vladimir Putin or does China, do they want us out of Afghanistan or in Afghanistan for another 20 years?
They want to say that.
They want us in for another 20 years.
They are not looking at what we've done with this empire and saying, oh, great, they bankrupted themselves and destroyed their culture.
Maybe we could be next on that.
I think they'd rather wait.
China's been going around and investing with countries while we've been occupying them militarily.
We have made the hugest blunder strategically in the 21st century of handing the 21st century to China.
We need to stop doing that.
What we should be doing is saying, yes, we're going to pull back.
We can trade with people, invest with them.
We're going to have the freest economy here we can have and be 100 times richer than China.
And they're not something we're going to have to worry about.
I'd much rather go in that direction than in the direction of, look, it's like this.
Anytime, I understand you're saying that you're not advocating for us provoking them.
You're talking about how do we make sure that we defend.
But once you create this entrenched power, this is where it's going to go.
You know, the old cold warriors back in the day, before the fall of the Soviet Union, guys like Bill Buckley, he used to say, you know, I basically agree with libertarians, you know, in theory.
But look, we got the Soviet Union.
So we have to have this big military-industrial complex.
In his words, we needed a totalitarian bureaucracy within our own shores just to fight off the Soviet Union, to fight this Cold War.
And then when the Soviet Union fell in 1991, they all went, great, military-industrial complex over.
Now we can go back to being a normal country.
Oh, no, of course they didn't.
Then they went, oh, we got to go see about Saddam Hussein.
We got to go see about Kosovo.
We got to go see.
And just wars continued on and on and on because once you have this entrenched government power, well, this is how they make money.
This is how they expand their power.
So it's not, I don't think you can have it perfectly down the middle where we're this big, bad policeman of the world, but we only do good by everyone.
It's too corrupting.
This is what the founders all said.
This is why we can't go around the world looking for monsters to slay.
We have to stay here.
90% of the world is in really bad shape.
It's not what first world people live like.
And I think you know that.
It's not, that is a sad, difficult reality.
But the best thing we can be is be a city on a hill, be an example to these other countries.
Let them learn from us.
If we're richer and happier and more prosperous and more free, other countries will try to emulate us.
We can't enforce it at the barrel of a gun.
It's not going to work.
And stop subsidizing our threats.
Well, that's for sure.
Whether it's the CIA funding the next terror group that we haven't even heard of yet, like they did with ISIS, like they did with Al-Qaeda.
Whether it's like we're talking about subsidizing, essentially subsidizing the economies of Russia and China through bad regulatory and tax structures here that make it harder to do business here.
Whether it's, I mean, what started with the Middle East, Operation Ajax, Eisenhower, because he didn't like the democratically elected government that was in Iran, he replaced it.
He did Operation Ajax, which was the CIA going in and deposing the democratically elected government, replacing it with the Shah, who was very unpopular, right?
And so he comes in and comes back in with a vengeance, and that leads to the revolution.
Yes, it leads to the Iranian Revolution, okay?
So now you have the Ayatollahs in charge.
This is what happens when we're saying, what are we going to do about it?
What we should do about it is look at how we got here and then how we can fix it.
If there were a stop China from invading anyone button, I don't think anyone here wouldn't press it.
But there isn't.
What there is, is a military-industrial complex that has proven itself really bad at doing things other than making money for cronies and corporate interests, killing lots and lots of people, and making us all less safe in the process.
Do you think there's a likelihood that we're going to have another Hitler?
No.
Are you seeing in the States or in the world?
No, no, no, no, worldwide.
Not in the States.
Do you think there's a likelihood that there will be possibly another Hitler?
I think it's unlikely.
I mean, it's not impossible.
Look, I think you have three figures in the 20th century who kind of rise to that level of evil in Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
Yeah.
And so the idea of having another one of them, I think that might be a type of unique evil that was somewhat unique to that time in this post-industrialized world in the aftermath of World War I.
I think it would be much harder to pull off today in a world where information travels so much quicker around the world.
That doesn't mean it's impossible.
And nuclear weapons too.
Nuclear weapons also.
Do you think it is likely?
I want to say I think it is likely.
And we have to look at what led to Hitler and Stalin and Mao, which, by the way, it wasn't them as individuals.
If it hadn't been them, it would have been someone else.
Okay.
So in Hitler, we had the Weimar Republic, which did out-of-control spending.
Also, the after effects of World War I. World War II is basically an extension of World War I. There was a, what, 20-year truce that happened there.
But in the meantime, you had the allied countries that were just destroying Germany's economy.
Germany's government was spending money out of control, and it led to the money being worth absolutely nothing.
And that allowed a man-madman like Hitler to come in because he provided a stark contrast to what everyone else was saying.
And that allowed that to happen.
And it was also our Federal Reserve.
I mean, if you look at in, I think it was in 28, the Nazis, the Nazi Party, destroyed in the elections in Germany.
Then they came back again, and the special election was in 1930, I think.
I might have, right around these years.
And they came back and they took a bunch of power.
This was how the Nazis got in power.
And it was all because of the Great Depression, which was caused by our bubble bursting here that the Federal Reserve created.
And then all of the debt got called in from Germany.
It destroyed the German people.
And of course, enforcing the Treaty of Versailles, as you said.
Look, Woodrow Wilson in World War I said we have to make the world safe for democracy, right?
Kind of this argument.
We had despots in Europe.
So we have to go there and overthrow them.
And we overthrow that, you know, the kings and queens, the monarchs are all gone in Europe, in England in name only.
But the monarchs are gone in England.
And then in the aftermath of World War I, you got Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.
And those monarchs looked pretty good at that point.
Well, I want to bring up one quick point, though.
I'm not against fighting.
I'm a Marine.
I'm not afraid of violence.
I'm trained to be violent.
Tons of my brothers and sisters have gone over there and lost arms and legs.
But my worry is, why am I Marines leaving their legs in the streets of, I don't know, Kandaharo or Baghdad?
If I'm going to leave my legs in the streets, in the streets of Manhattan, I'll fight for my city.
I'll fight for my country.
I'll fight for my nation.
I'm not afraid of that.
But why are we sending literally millions of men and women to go fight overseas?
And when they come back, we treat them like garbage anyway.
And then we don't even know why they die.
They don't know why their lives are ruined.
This is not the right answer, right?
If they're going to die, and I'm telling you, I know these people.
They would lay their life down.
And when I was a Marine, I would have ordered men to their death or I would have gone to my death because Ronald Reagan, who was my first commander-in-chief, would have told me to do so.
And many of them would do it.
But why are we doing it in Afghanistan?
Literally for nothing.
In Iraq?
Literally for nothing.
The active duty military people vote and send more money to the most anti-war presidential candidates.
Ron Paul got more money from active duty military members than every other Republican combined in 2008 and 2012.
Donald Trump got far more support from the military than Hillary Clinton when he was taking a more dubbish stance in 2016.
The people who actually have to fight these wars are the ones who know what's up and they don't want to do it.
Iron Johnson was popular with veterans too.
He got some like double digits, right?
I've been to almost all 50 states at this point in just the last two, three years, during the campaign and after the campaign, working on you were the power and growing that now.
Doing that, I've met with people across the country.
I would say that at any event that I do, anywhere from 20 to 40% of the people that come out are either active duty or veterans who are coming.
What brought them into libertarianism was either me or someone else, Dave or Larry or Ron Paul or whomever else, telling them that we were against the wars of intervention.
We were against the military-industrial complex.
We were against the Veterans Administration single, it's not even single payer, government-run healthcare system that's completely destroying their health, the health that they were promised when they came back.
That's what's bringing them to it.
This system isn't working.
It makes us less safe.
It wastes a bunch of money.
Scores, countless scores of people are dying overseas.
Many more are coming here and dying.
Veterans are, people are going over, active duty troops are going over there and dying.
The ones that are fortunate enough to come home not in a flag draped casket, come home with PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, all sorts of health problems.
They're given the worst form of health care in this country, the Veterans Administration.
One out of every 10 homeless people is homeless.
One out of every 10 people in every 10 homeless people is a veteran.
One out of every 10 prisoners is a veteran.
It's actually higher than that now.
And this is as a direct result of this system.
So when we're saying do something, yes, we should do something.
And that something is looking at the root cause of what even caused a communist regime to be powerful in the first place and stop doing that.
Yeah.
So for Jessica, do you have anything to say here?
Because we're about to take a shot at Tequila after this.
Oh, I'm ready for Tequila.
Okay, all right, good.
So, Adam, if you want to start.
So, let me finish.
Let me finish this, and I want to hear what you say here.
So, this is what I'm getting from what you guys are saying.
Okay.
Military-industrial complex, check.
We don't disagree.
Most of the wars started that we didn't need to go to, they were not necessary.
Fine, check 90%.
Let's put it out there.
You can say 100%.
Fine.
They were not necessary.
Let's go there.
The only area for me with this that concerns me that I think the argument needs to be sold in a better way is you have to believe that there are certain people worried and fearing the next possible Hitler that decides to go out there and do something.
I think your argument has to touch on that a little bit to know that here's how we would handle that person.
I'm a strategist.
I'm a defense guy.
I'm an insurance guy.
I'm a financial guy.
So it's always a defensive strategy in case of a market crash.
If the market, like right now, inflation is about to go up.
Goldman Sachs, we had a meeting with them last week saying, the last time the interest rates went up twice in a span of a quarter, three months, we had a recession within 24 months, 60% chance there's been a recession.
Well, we're in a recession right now.
We're about to go through it.
Home property value is going to drop.
You guys are seeing what's going on with crypto, what's going on with Bitcoin, what's going on with Ethereum.
You can't keep doing this.
They raised it at half a point in the heist in the last four decades.
This time is coming.
So how are we prepared for it, right?
This isn't, oh, we're never going to have another recession.
Oh, we're never going to have another depression.
That's naive to think.
No, no, it's coming.
We're never going to have another Hitler.
We have to think, not we have to say there's going to be one.
We have to say, if there is, da, That's the only part I'm saying.
If a country like a China or Russia decides to go out there and impose around their neighbors, what are we going to be doing?
I guess the point that I think I was trying to get at before, and I think this is a bitter pill for a lot of Americans to swallow, that, if you're looking for someone, that's us right now.
Yeah, that's us.
We're the ones who have been that.
We have to have a lot of people.
I mean, if you want to talk about the blood that Vladimir Putin has on his hands, they make this huge deal about when he invaded Crimea.
You know how many people died when he invaded Crimea?
Six.
Six people died in the invasion of Crimea.
Now, in Ukraine, there have been, it looks like tens of thousands of people dying, and that's 23,000 of his own people.
24,000 of his own people.
It's horrible.
It's inexcusable.
I'm like the most anti-war person on the planet.
I'm not making any excuse for that.
However, it's just like, look, it doesn't always have to be Hitler exactly, but there can be very, very bad people who kill a lot of people.
That was a pretty unique thing, Hitler, like gassing children and stuff.
That was a unique evil, maybe the most evil thing in history.
But if you're looking at who is the great evil right now, objectively speaking, we're sitting on the other side of this equation, which is, I think, a bitter pill to swallow from the inside of the empire.
So my perspective on that is just like, look, we got it, like, let's work on rolling that evil back.
If there is a Hitler that rises up outside of the United States of America, some evil person, then, yeah, I agree with you.
There should be contingencies in mind.
We should be thinking about what can we do to kind of have the whole world unite against this unique evil if that were to arise.
However, my only point that I keep kind of, you know, harping on is that we're probably, we are definitely the closest to that right now.
Not us, our federal national government.
And this has been sold by always invoking this guy's the next Hitler.
Saddam Hussein was the next Hitler.
And then Gaddafi was the next Hitler.
And then Assad is the next Hitler.
And then every single war that they want, they always tell you this guy is the next Hitler.
So I am just more concerned.
I think in reality, it's much more of an issue, the blood that our country has on its hands right now.
And the fact that this obsession with finding the next Hitler leads to claiming people who could never, like the idea that Gaddafi, after decades of ruling this country, was about to go Hitlerian genocidal was complete nonsense.
And it's basically been demonstrated at this point that all the intelligence on that was wrong.
And look at the result of it.
Did you put Gaddafi and Putin in the same camp?
That Putin's not capable of doing that?
No, Putin is more capable.
Yes, they are more capable than.
But to deal with those people, you don't have to have a military industrial complex.
That's my point.
We're not saying that, though.
No one's saying that.
No, no.
Nobody here is saying that at all.
Whatever that next Hitler is, you can do it without the military industrial complex.
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were left.
Well, Hitler was a right-wing reactionary, was the leader of a right-wing reactionary movement.
Stalin and Mao were leaders of the left-wing reactionary movements.
Actually, Lenin was, and then Stalin took over, but Mao was in charge of the left-wing reactionary movement in China.
These are reactions to bad systems.
It wasn't like everything was going great in those countries, and then mean old Hitler, Stalin, and Mao showed up, or mean old Lenin, Hitler, and Mao showed up.
We have to look at what leads to these things happening and then fix that.
This is like going to a doctor and you have cancer and they go, oh, well, you see, you got a burn there on your skin.
We're going to deal with that.
Well, the burn's being caused by a cancer, a systemic problem that needs to be fixed.
And if you don't deal with the cancer, then you're just going to keep dealing with symptoms until the patient dies, right?
We have, these are symptoms.
Hitler was not the problem.
He was a symptom of a problem.
And what?
Stalin and Mao were not the symptoms.
They were the symptoms of that problem.
The problem is a system that benefits a very small handful of people by design at everyone else's expense.
And that's why libertarians focus so much on the Federal Reserve and on the central banking system and on things like that.
It's that that leads to those.
Yeah.
And look, even with the worst of all of them, Mao Cedong, right?
I mean, he has more deaths on his hands than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined.
And look, Richard Nixon went over to China and shook his hand.
And Pat Buchanan, the most right-wing guy you could think of, was writing speeches for him.
He said, Pat Buchanan literally said in his book that he was making himself nauseous because he was Nixon's speechwriter as he had to write these nice things about Mao Cedong.
I mean, imagine writing nice things about the most worst human being who's ever existed on the planet, you know?
But he did that.
And that opened up relations.
And that was better.
You know, if I was thinking about how to deal with a country like China or like North Korea or something like that, I'd be almost down for some like guerrilla private organization to be like, we're smuggling DVDs and like internet hotspots into this country to open it up.
That's what they're terrified of.
That's what North Korea is terrified of.
They're smuggling DVDs from South Korea and they start seeing the South Korean soap operas and they go, why do they have so much food on their plates?
You've been telling us we're richer than them.
I've never seen this much food.
You know what I mean?
It's like, that's the, like, the question becomes, like, to Spike's point, what caused this cancer?
And then, what, like, what is the cure for it?
And the cure for it isn't military conflict.
They said the downfall of the USSR wasn't anything militarily.
It was freaking blue jeans.
Yep.
That's right.
And movies.
It was that, and really, what is that?
That is a result of the fact that our economic system of capitalism, even the kind of corrupt capitalism that we had, was superior to their economic system.
And that they ultimately wanted a good life like Americans were having.
So does everyone.
How much longer after Karl Marx wrote his book, Communist Manifesto, we had a country that was a communistic country running on his philosophies?
About 50 years, right?
Yeah, some people.
50 years at the time?
About 50 years of that.
So Nolan came out in 71.
It is now 2022.
So we're done.
And you're talking about that.
There's not one country for libertarian.
A time is now.
And the only ones you can say, maybe New Zealand's got an element of it, but not necessarily fully there.
So why hasn't a, if this philosophy is so effective and so peaceful and so necessary and so free, why hasn't one of these countries chosen to take it up as their way of running their country?
Well, here's what, as Milton Friedman, right, as someone you're a fan of, I mean, he would say it this way, right?
That if you want to look, look, the United States of America, between the end of, let's say, take the end of the Civil War to about 1910.
So about 1865 to 1910.
In this, and I'm not saying everything was perfect back then.
I'm not saying it was a libertarian society.
But economically speaking, looking at it, there was no central bank.
There was no income tax.
There was essentially no federal regulation of the economy.
The national spending was something like 2% of the national income.
By today's standards, you'd be like, this is basically anarchist.
There's literally no government intervention.
And in this time period, we had the largest at the time expansion of wealth, the biggest improvement in the lot and life of the average man in the history of the world.
There's the wealth that had never been thought of before was created.
Now, the problem that I think freedom has is that, also a Milton Friedman quote, he goes, you know, freedom is in the general interest, but it's not in anybody's special interest.
There's the issue.
And so what happens is as the wealth gets created more and more, the government tends to siphon off.
The parasitical class tends to siphon more and more and more, and this grows the government.
And so this is the issue that we've been dealing with.
It's like because we're the richest country in the world, it was because we were the most free country in the world, we become the richest country in the world.
Because we're the richest country in the world, we now have the largest tax base.
This leads to the government getting bigger and bigger, and now we have the largest government in the world, the largest, most powerful government in the history of humanity.
It's the United States federal government.
So that is the challenge.
But it's not as if no country's, maybe no country has embraced the entire libertarian program.
That's also true for Marxism.
It's not as if any country really embraced every single word he ever wrote.
But the countries who have embraced more freedom have been the most successful countries in the world.
So we just, I think my view for what the solution is to that is to create as much of a libertarian populist uprising as we can have.
I think the more people that believe in these values, the more libertarians there are, the more likely we are to live in a libertarian.
Well, I think libertarian is a philosophical outlook, whereas independent just means you are not part of one of these two, you know what I mean?
Or any of the parties.
One's a political affiliation.
So you can be equal philosophy.
I mean, you could be both a libertarian and an independent, or you could be a member of the Libertarian Party and an independent thinker, but an independent could just be something different than what the establishment is.
Whereas we are something specific, people who believe in human liberty.
And the reason that a lot of independents aren't coming to the Libertarian Party, and for that matter, a lot of most self-described libertarians aren't members of the Libertarian Party.
So for example, one of the best ways you can judge if someone's a libertarian or not is how they register in their voting.
In most states, the difference between registered libertarians in states that have party registering or have third party registering and members of that state party is 99%.
Yes.
It's like 1% of not, and I'm not talking about the population of the state.
I'm saying people that have already identified as libertarians are not joining the party.
And the reason is, and I think this is what you're saying, you're not asking from a philosophical standpoint.
You're saying, why are people not becoming libertarians?
And I think the answer is because our focus has been wrong.
We talk all the time about what libertarians are going to do for the wars, what we're going to do for health care, what we're going to do in D.C. and with the Federal Reserve.
And those are good things to talk about.
But long before the vast majority of people who actually decide who is in office decide to give us a shot, they want to see how we're going to deal with things in their backyard.
I'm trying to think about it.
No, and I know you are.
And the reason that I, coming out of the campaign, the reason that I started You Are the Powers because we're doing exactly that.
Localized grassroots single-issue activism.
Show people what libertarianism looks like as policy, how it actually looks like in practice instead of these great theories.
I can come in here and sell you the best idea possible, but if it never happens, then it makes just as much sense for me to say, you know, the way we're going to deal with China is by me throwing magic thunderbolts at them, and then that'll fix it.
With the likelihood of us winning the presidency right now, I might as well give that answer.
It makes more sense for our main focus to be on where we're actually already winning, sometimes despite ourselves, which is at the local level, which grows us as a party.
It shows people that we aren't this, you know, a utopian pipe dream.
It's actual common sense, feasible things that can be done, and we can build up from there.
And we build the infrastructure because not only when The Rock converts to libertarianism, will he be able to win because we have the structure in place, but he'll want to in the first place instead of just joining one of the other parties and trying to change it from the inside, which never happens.
That's a scam there.
But the reason that they would do that is because right now we don't have much to offer them.
So we have to build from the ground up.
And if we don't do that, then we're going to be here 50 years later talking about in theory how ending the Federal Reserve would end our 400% inflation rate.
In 2018, after I won ballot access and party status for my party, Libertarian Party in New York, I crossed the state again in 2019 after I had lost.
But I, by the way, to your point, there were 7,000 registered libertarians in New York State in 2018.
I got 100,000 votes.
He's a prototype of what I'm talking about.
Exactly.
That's exactly what he says.
So then after that, I crossed the state again.
And in 2019, we had 107 victories at the local level.
We went from zero libertarians to 107 in one year.
And then the state afterwards decided, oh, yeah, we're going to change the rules on how you can get in the ballot.
So now we couldn't get in the ballot anymore.
And you might say, what does that mean?
Most people don't realize getting on the ballot, just being on a ballot so you can have a choice to vote for me, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, takes a massive amount of people to get on a ballot.
You came in the ballot.
When the people independents came to me with tons of money and said, Larry, we want to run as independent in 2022.
People ask me that 2022, 2020.
I'm sorry, 2020, we're going to run independent.
I said, great, you're going to have to have $40 million and you probably won't be able to get an official states.
They're like, what?
So, yeah.
Well, we have that money.
I know you can raise $50 million, but you can't get through the red tape to be on every single ballot in 50 states.
Just run libertarian.
We've already done that already.
They're like, well, we're going to run independent.
You can't.
If you could run independent, there'd be a president Bloomberg right now.
It's impossible.
Ballot access is one of our biggest issues, why I run to gain ballot access so people can't on the ballot.
And we just got hammered again in New York State.
Now I got to get 45,000 signatures in six weeks.
And they just made new laws that destroyed our local congressional districts.
So now Congress people can't even get on the ballot independent because there's no congressional district.
Let me ask you.
They hammer us this way.
Tell me who is a major influencer in America today that has libertarian tendencies.
Would you put Musk in that category or no?
No, I put Musk in that category, Rogan in that category.
Absolutely.
I put Drew Kerry, who talks to seniors every day in his teaching.
Did you put Thiel in that category?
Yeah.
Thiel's an iconic.
I think he kind of like he's certainly very interested in libertarian ideas.
I think he kind of is somewhere between a populist and a libertarian.
Musk, what would you say Musk is?
Musk, I think, is actually a left libertarian.
I think so is Rogan.
I think both of them are left-wing libertarians.
Okay.
So who has sat down with these guys to try to get them to start selling the concept of libertarianism?
Well, not Rogan.
I'm talking Musk.
Yeah.
I mean, Rogan's a Joe's a good friend of mine.
But there's in terms of, I'm trying to work on him to get us to get Peter Thiel and those guys on board.
But I think that, I mean, Joe's the guy to do that.
Peter Thiel, I believe, donated to Ron Paul's campaign.
I believe so.
So I think he's well aware of these ideas.
Also, weirdly enough, Jack Dorsey tweeted out Murray Rothbard article, Man Economy, and State, which to me is like the greatest libertarian piece of writing in his life.
Well, he's a big crypto.
Yeah, so he's kind of in that world.
But I don't doubt something really.
I don't know what his deal is, though.
Because he's like, now he's like, Elon Musk is right.
No one should be kicked off Twitter.
And you're like, can I ask you?
You were there for a while, man.
You could have heard this.
Larry brought up Andrew Yang.
We had Andrew Yang, what, a month ago?
Yeah.
He literally backed me.
He's endorsed me.
I'm literally backed by the forward.
Okay, so he's starting this new forward party.
Okay.
That's essentially a competitor, the Libertarian Party?
No, no, an ally.
An ally.
It is an ally, 100%, because they want to break the duopoly just like we do.
We are 100% allies.
Okay, but aren't you guys competing for votes?
Yes, we are competing for votes, but we are allies in crushing duopoly.
That's why he realized you can't, it's hard to run within the party, right?
He realized it.
Amash realized it.
Tosi Gabbard left Democratic Party.
I mean, maybe not officially, but in reality, she has.
They're all leaving because they realize the two-party system doesn't work.
That's why we're allies.
We are all allies.
It's like when the Japanese invaded China, right?
There were the Maoists, and then there were the Chiang Kai-shek people.
They got together to fight the Japanese.
That's us.
We're together to fight the empire.
No, that doesn't end very well.
It doesn't.
It doesn't.
But let's hope we change that one.
We learn from our mistakes.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
100%.
What about the Green Party?
We work together.
I know Howie Hawkins.
Howie Hawkins is my friend.
We're both Marines.
And by the way, Howie Hawkins is so far left, we got our guns back.
He's actually pro-2A.
He's a real socialist.
He literally was the Socialist Party nominee in 2020.
And he is my friend, and we are absolutely allies.
Is there enough room for all these parties that are getting 1%?
If you add them all up, remember, New York State is a plurality state.
I don't need 51% of New Yorkers.
I need 35% of those who vote.
There are 18 million New Yorkers, about 12 million eligible to vote, 10 million registered to vote, about 6 million actually vote.
So if I get about 2 million, 2.5 million votes, I win.
So I need about one in eight.
I don't even need a majority anyway one in eight, and I'm the government.
Larry, for the people you were talking off camera, how are the conditions in New York?
What's happened in New York the last 10 years?
Oh, my God, horrible.
New York, we've lost over 2 million people in the past 11 years, to include this guy right here, which makes me angry.
But yes, we've lost lots of people from New York.
They all take off and they leave, and they leave because we're too oppressive, right?
Our government is so oppressive that it breaks up families.
My mother had to retire and eventually die in South Carolina because she couldn't afford living in New York State, and she left her grandchildren for that.
It's terrible.
New York State is a basket case where we now have a budget that went from $170 billion to $220 billion while we're losing millions of people.
That math doesn't work.
We just keep raising our budget.
We just keep making things harder.
We keep making more rules and regulations.
We keep crushing our families.
And then we wonder why.
Some realtors are telling me that 1,000 people a day are leaving.
If you guys have noticed that you have some much louder, more obnoxious neighbors lately.
Yes.
I showed you the cover on the Wall Street Journal about how Miami's are basically up in arms about how much rent has increased.
Florida is red because of New York.
Florida used to be a swing state, but we have exported all of our Republican, our red and conservative voters to Florida.
We made Florida a red state.
It was a purple state before New York.
Jessica, is there any state worse than California?
I mean, what's going on there?
Oh, no.
I had a question for you about what you think of the recent development about in New York not even needing to be a citizen to vote.
Yeah, they can't do it in federal elections, but they can do it in local elections.
That's going to come into effect in New York.
It's a terrible idea for many reasons, but one of them is because it's only 30 days, which just makes it extra bad.
So maybe I should go visit so I can come vote for you.
You can.
You should shove her up.
But yes, shovel up.
Exactly.
Just stay for 31 days and you can vote in New York City.
That's a city thing, not a state thing.
It's a city thing.
Can we go to the next topic?
Borders.
Libertarian.
Come on, borders.
So I talked to Joe about borders, okay?
You know, let people come in.
You know, don't worry about it.
We don't have to worry about it.
What is your position when it comes onto the borders?
Oh, yeah.
So I have a very different outlook on borders.
And there's a big divide.
There's been a big split amongst libertarians.
I'm not an open borders guy.
I don't believe that that's the correct libertarian position.
My thing is that in the philosophical abstract, I don't think that anybody inherently has a right to go to an area that they don't own or are not invited to.
And so I think that probably my ideal situation under the current paradigm would be something like a sponsorship system, an invitee system, where you basically have to get an American citizen to vouch for you and financially kind of, you know, like back you in order to come into the country.
I don't think that just roves of people showing up have some inherent right to be here because they decided they wanted to.
But the current system is insane.
Yes.
I mean, we basically subsidize, the taxpayer is forced to subsidize immigration, and then the taxpayer is forced to subsidize the war on immigration.
And then just everything about it is madness.
So the number one thing is that you end the war on drugs, you roll back as much of the warfare state, the welfare state as you can.
This way you're not subsidizing people to come in and you cut down on the black markets and the smuggling and all of that stuff.
And all of the interventions in Latin America and all of the DEA operations there where we prop up the cartels that makes life miserable for people in those countries and leads to more floods of immigration.
I'd like to take more steps like that, but I am not on the Joe Jorgensen idea of like just, I think the idea that under current situations, just opening the borders tomorrow, Trump's idea of a border?
I've always had the kind of Ron Paul conspiratorial skepticism that I don't like the idea of building walls.
I think they could be used to keep us in.
And I don't like walls on kind of, I think really bad governments tend to build walls, and I don't like that.
But I do think that it was reasonable that Donald Trump stood up for tens of millions of Americans who were like, look, we do not like that we have no say in who comes into our country.
I think that's a reasonable position for those people that have to do it.
I don't think it makes them evil racists for feeling that way.
You can have vibrant immigration and screw your borders.
And this is the policy of what we should be doing.
We're talking about it for literally six years.
You build two Ellis Islands on a southern border.
One may in Texas, maybe one in California.
These two Ellis Islands are controlled by two separate companies.
And the companies are private companies and they're basically recruiting companies.
If you want to come to our country, you go to one of the Ellis Islands.
What you do, you go there and they put you in quarantine or give you your check-ins, whatever they do.
They check you out.
If you are okay, they give you an orange card.
And any state that agrees that wants to be part of this thing, they send you off to that state to go work.
We know that you're working in that state.
You check in every two years.
While you're there, you are not allowed to take any public assistance at all and you pay your taxes.
All you do, you just check in.
If you don't check in in two years, we come get you.
We know where you are.
We come get you.
If you do check in, as long as everything's good, keep going.
Another two years, you keep going.
Now, how do you pay for that?
We don't pay for that.
They do.
There's a model that's already working.
It's called recruiting companies.
Recruiters get paid as they place people.
Right now, farms, people in the hospitality industry, restaurants industries are spending billions of dollars in the black market to get labor.
Well, don't spend in the black market.
Just pay these guys.
They'll get you workers as much as you want.
Now, what if the people, you say, well, women, they're still bad people.
Yes, they won't go to the Ellis Islands.
They'll be along the border.
That's what you use Border Patrol for, to get the bad guys.
This where the only people starving in the deserts aren't innocent families.
They're bad guys who are doing bad things.
I don't want anyone to stop in the desert.
But if anyone's going to stop in the desert, let it be them.
And our border patrol, without having to raise any extra money, is now focused only on that.
Well, Larry, what if one of those Bellis Islands do poorly or hurt people?
That's why there's two of them.
People will go to the one they want as they're making money and the market will make it better and better.
But it's a bigger piece of that.
There's give or take 10 to 12 million people in America right now who are undocumented.
We don't know what they're doing, where they are.
They can go to the Ellis Island too.
They can pack up and just go there and go, you know what?
I want to become legal.
Great.
Go to the Ellis Island.
Spend your 30 days.
Get checked out.
You're good.
Go back to work.
Work legally.
When they go back, all of a sudden, the rest of the people in the community go, huh?
So you didn't get deported?
No.
I did my paperwork.
I pay my taxes.
I don't take any public assistance.
They're going to start going too, which makes law enforcement's job easier.
There are bad people who come across the border in our country.
We can't get them.
They're all in enclaves right now, and everyone's scared to say where Bad Pablo is.
But if all of a sudden they're legal, they can call the cops.
Where's Bad Pablo?
Right there.
Don't say him, go get him, cops.
I'm not getting deported.
He can't blackmail me anymore.
So now law enforcement can do their job.
You will watch the undocumented population shrink over the course of 10 years because most will just go get documented and the bad guys will get caught.
This is an actual system that can work.
And we can build more of them as many as people want.
Build a bunch of them if people want to.
Doesn't matter.
But here's the best part.
If you do that, you now can make a private company authorized to now give things like green cards, right?
Say over 10 years or whatever, take a test or whatever, whatever rules you want.
They can start doing that process through that.
Whether you have to speak English or whatever's the rules, you create those rules.
Well, that doesn't affect anybody in line for the government.
In fact, eventually the government will probably be worse.
People start going to that instead of going to the government.
We'll save money because more people will go to those Ellis Islands than go through the government system.
This is an actual libertarian solution.
The market is stepped in.
We don't raise any extra money.
Nourish your taxes.
Everyone gets better service.
And law enforcement is assisted.
And if you couple that with what Dave was saying, ending the main reasons for these massive surges to begin with, which is the DEA and the CIA and other government agencies through the war on drugs, sponsoring the U.S.-sponsored cartels to fight against the Russia and China-sponsored cartels so that they can take over this country and massacre anyone that didn't vote for their candidates.
That's why they're fleeing.
That's why you have, I mean, think of the Sophie's choice situation that so many people there are making, where they're sending their children off with smugglers they don't know, knowing the likelihood of them getting raped, them getting sex trafficked, them get ending up in one of these cages.
I'm sorry, Joe Biden's president now, these shelters.
They stopped being cages January of 21.
But they're doing that because they know the likelihood of them staying there is almost 100% that they'll be killed.
That's the kind of problems that are being caused by the war on drugs.
When you end that, a lot of these surges aren't happening.
And now whatever system we use, whether it's through sponsorship, whether it's through more of an Ellis Island style system, whatever it is, you're not going to be managing all of the people that are coming here.
The current system we have now, the war on drugs and the war on migration, have led to both a bunch of people who are just trying to flee violence in cages or being separated from their families, which by the way is costing the taxpayer anywhere between $500 and $800 per day per person.
Many of them spend months in there.
I mean, you want to talk about a welfare system that costs far more than any welfare system, right?
You've got that going on.
You've got this major impediment to the flow of goods and services and people across the borders.
Increasingly, to your point about walls being used the other way, increasingly traffic into Mexico is being stopped by Border Patrol agents for national security and drug control reasons.
It's for control.
It's another way to skim, right?
But so that's happening.
And in the midst of all that, there are still millions of people here illegally, including MS-13 members and all the worst scary people.
And also a lot of people that aren't.
They just, there is no legal process for them to come here, so they came here illegally.
If you focus on, if you allow people to come and you have a more expedited system, then now law enforcement can focus on actual bad guys, like Larry and Dave both said.
And I can speak on this as someone who, my wife, when we got married, I was her sponsor to come here.
The process we went through that cost thousands of dollars did absolutely nothing.
Had my wife been a terrorist or whatever else, nothing they did would have stopped her from coming in.
They asked her, are you a terrorist?
No.
Okay, are you a communist?
No.
They asked her if she was a Nazi.
My wife is black and I'm Jewish.
She told them that.
Okay, just, you know, we're talking about...
Good for you, by the way.
We're talking about do something.
What was her answer?
I'll get to that.
Don't leave us in the street.
I'm trying to create a cliffhanger here, okay?
Listen, I know how to build up a story.
So they asked her if she's a Nazi.
She said, I'm black.
My husband is Jewish.
Do you know what the response of the people who we have put in charge or our government is put in charge of protecting?
I said, well, ma'am, your husband could be a Nazi if you wanted to.
He's an American citizen.
These are the people when we're saying we need to protect ourselves from the bad guy.
This guy heard, I'm black and my husband's Jewish.
And somehow that made him think, well, I get, but he could be a Nazi if he wanted to.
These are not, we're not sending our best, okay?
When it comes to this, we're not sending our best and brightest.
This is another government program, and government programs don't do a good job at fixing this.
We fix this by dealing with the government interventions that have made this worse.
And then whatever is left, we can deal with that through market, through sponsorships, through a private L-asylum system, whatever, but do it in a way that now it's not this massive crisis surge.
You don't have this humanitarian crisis on the border.
You don't have children in cages.
You don't have millions of people here illegally, including gang members and everything else.
And if there's any shot that they have of stopping bad guys from getting in here, it's going to be from them focusing on the people who are the most likely to be the bad guys because coming here for the right reasons is easy and able to be done.
So you guys are on the same page on this topic.
Border.
More or less.
I mean, like, we have slight differences probably between all three of us, but I do think that really, like, what we'd all probably agree on is that right at the heart of this is a war on drugs issue.
I mean, the major problem that you have at the border is the gang element of it, the criminal element of it, the drugs that are being smuggled in and the crime that's associated with that.
And much like, you know, when we tried prohibition, that all of a sudden it was like there was this criminal gang mob element that rose up with it.
Now, after repealing prohibition, the murder rate dramatically fell.
The crime rate dramatically fell.
Now, alcohol still is a problem.
I mean, alcohol isn't great, and there are people who abuse it.
There are people who ruin their lives over it.
There are people who get very violent when they're on it.
Like, there's a bunch of problems with it.
But you don't have the gang criminal problem still associated with alcohol because it's legalized.
And likewise, that would happen with these other drugs as well.
That doesn't mean there's no problems associated with it.
You know, like everything in life is trade-offs.
There's costs and benefits to everything.
It's just that the costs are far worse of black markets and prohibition than they are of legalization.
Which government institution, like where does the government get things right?
That's a tough one.
When it fails to intervene.
I want to say something here.
If when it comes to government.
Like, would this be border patrols that are working for the government?
Is this who would be on the border?
So you need the border patrol.
That's the government agency.
I'm not saying we, you heard me say it.
I'm not about abolish everything immediately.
I'm about create institutions that are private and community to give the support we need.
Then government institutions will either get better, I can't see how, but they might, or they'll begin to go away because community will step up.
Correct.
Something better will step up, but we have to create an environment.
As long as government monopolizes everything, we're not able to have community support.
And then that's my issue.
This is why I like the Elvis Island private idea, because eventually what will happen?
Immigration could be controlled by privatized companies who know what they're doing, compete against each other to make sure they do things right.
We won't require a government.
Eventually, they'll want to patrol their own.
They'll begin to do this on their own if we create the right environment.
Problem I have is most people want a 30 second, 10 second solution that's magical.
These are systemic issues that will take 10 years to repair, but we've got to set them all in motion.
That's the key.
Government is driven by a high time preference that they have helped to create.
They have helped through government schooling to teach everyone that there's this terrible thing that's happening because we're letting you do this.
We're not going to let you do it anymore.
We have a magic fix that's going to fix it.
Oops, that didn't fix it.
It made it worse.
We need more control.
And it's an endless cycle.
We saw this with COVID.
We've seen this with terrorism.
We've seen it with everything.
Now, the problem is, if you don't have something to replace it with, then ultimately it's either this or nothing.
Now, sometimes nothing's better, but there's something better than nothing, which is something that would actually fix that problem.
Perfect example.
Bitcoin, cryptocurrency.
How much easier is it us for us to sell people on ending central banking because there's something already in place?
If there wasn't, we'd be, and they said, well, what are you going to replace the Federal Reserve with?
Well, it's going to work out.
The market will fix it.
To saying that to the average person, you're basically saying to them, or what they hear is, I don't really care.
I care more about my ideas than your well-being.
And I'm super smart and I'm trying to tell you that.
That's what the market will fix this sounds like.
You have the market.
If the market can fix this, then let's use the market to fix it, which is why, again, we need to focus more on, okay, identifying the problem.
Okay, here's the problem and here's how it was created or made worse by government.
But then also, here is a solution that is outside of government so that government now, to Larry's point, can either compete with that or just not do it anymore.
Let's talk about what government is for a second.
Government is at its core a monopoly that is enforced with violence, financed by theft.
Now, whether you think government's necessary, not necessary, whatever you consider yourself, let's just take a step back on what government actually is.
Now, let's ask this question.
If you were going to come up with the best way to provide a service, would you settle on a monopoly that is financed by theft and enforced by violence?
Is that where you'd like to get your chicken sandwiches from?
Is that where you'd like to get your health care from?
Is that where you'd like to get different things that you need from?
A company that can do whatever it wants to you and does not have to provide you with any value.
And the only reason that you're even using them in the first place is because you have no other option and they will punish you if you don't?
No.
But we also can't say, well, we don't need government.
We can just do it ourselves.
We have to actually do it ourselves and provide actual feasible solutions.
And when possible, with borders, not so much you'd have to actually have government policy to bring in things like the Ellis Island or whatever.
But outside of that, like, for example, cryptocurrency, the blockchain, mutual aid, working together on the ground, you can actually come up with real, feasible solutions that work so that instead of me having to have this long, high-minded, philosophical, first principles discussion about how libertarianism is going to work, I can just say this.
That fixed it.
It's literally what I'm doing.
It's why every time you ask me a question, I said, I will give you a policy.
You may not have liked my answer, but I gave you an answer every single time.
I didn't fall back to ideology.
I didn't fall back to concepts.
I said, we will do this every single time.
That's why people are following me because I give them actual answers.
At the end of Joe Rogan's show, if anyone watches it, by the way, episode 1167.
If anyone happens to just want to watch it, at the end of that episode, he said, Larry, I love your ideas.
Where'd they come from?
I said, well, me and my team, we put them together.
We've put policies together.
He goes, you better lock those things down.
I said, why?
He said, people will take them.
I said, take them.
I don't have to run them.
I can go back to my business.
Take it.
Fix the country.
Fix my state.
I'll go home.
I don't have to do this.
I got stuff to do.
I got a family.
I got friends.
I'll go do that instead.
So I'm about policy.
That's what I'm all about.
If we have better policies, people, to your point, will just go, that makes sense.
Spice.
Larry Davies.
2024.
Who would you like to see be the leading candidate or the nominee for Libertarian Party representing the Libertarian Party?
No, I'm kidding.
I really think we need to get it.
You brought it back.
You said don't say the name.
I was teasing you.
She heard it, though.
She's watching his podcast.
Don't you say that name?
Her team is coming after you.
I happen to agree with the idea of somebody popular.
That to me matters tremendously.
Somebody popular.
Do you have a name?
I would take someone like a Drew Carrie because he talks to all the people who vote.
His audience is literally voters, right?
He does the Price is Right show, right?
And they're all like retired seniors.
So that's good because they'll vote for him because they know him.
But anybody popular, I'm good with.
That's what I want.
Someone who is popular.
I'm in.
Okay.
Dave.
Someone really great, so I don't have to do it would be good.
Maybe The Rock.
Anyone got his number here?
Would you consider it?
Because I know they're throwing your name in there constantly.
Yeah.
Well, I have a lot of people in my camp within the libertarian world who want me to do it.
And I've kind of been open in saying that I consider doing it.
But like if there was, kind of in the spirit of what Larry said, I really love my career.
I really love my family.
I got two little kids.
If someone else could do a really great job at it, that'd be awesome.
I'd be happy to do that.
But I do think that we have the reason why I joined the Libertarian Party is because I think this party has a real opportunity, particularly in the current political landscape in America.
And it's been frustrating to me to watch the presidential candidates get this golden opportunity to really, I'm not saying they could win the presidency.
Obviously, that's where we're many steps off from that, but to really change the narrative, force the other two parties to have to talk about the issues that we care about, open up tens of millions of Americans' minds to a whole different way to look at how we organize a society legally and politically.
I've seen that opportunity and I feel like I know what they should be doing with that opportunity.
And if no one else is going to do it, then I probably have to do it.
Let's be cool.
I would support him.
I'm 39, so I'd be 31.
Yeah, he's popular.
I would support him too.
Anyone who's popular, I want to support him.
And not only that, he sells it very much.
I need someone who's a libertarian, obviously.
That should be, I mean, libertarian.
You've got to be libertarian and popular.
If you're libertarian and popular, I'm in.
So question: do you have anybody you'd like to see?
Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel.
Okay, I don't know if he would do that.
I think he's more of a.
I don't know if he's a candidate type.
I think he's more the guy you want to.
He's a king.
He's behind a closed door.
Spike, did you want to go?
Yeah, so if you had to pick the four people that are asked the most if they're going to run for the nomination, it's the three of us and Justin Amash.
Likely, I would think.
I don't think I'm missing anyone there.
And what I say when I'm asked that is that pretty much a lot of the things that they've said, that it needs to be someone who is able to excite people, who is able to demonstrate that they actually can do things and provide solutions, someone that is an actual libertarian.
I think that is obviously important.
And someone who is popular and has a magnetic personality and can bring people in.
I also say that I don't even really care right now who our nominee is.
Right now, we are talking about who the next person is to go and score the margin of error.
The reason I started You Are the Power is because I want one day for our presidential candidate in 24, 28, whenever, whether it's one of us or someone way better than us, to actually have a shot of winning.
And in the meantime, before we get to this utopian future where libertarians take over the world and leave everyone alone, that's something we like to say, is actually show how, actually help people now.
There are people suffering under the abuses and excesses of government from the federal level all the way down to the local level, which is actually where most tyranny happens, is your city council, your county council, your state government.
Now, help them now.
Build coalitions with people now.
Bring them into the movement now.
I'm like these two.
I've been retired since 2017.
I'd like to go back to being retired.
I say I'm retired now.
It just means I don't get paid.
I do way more now than I did when I was working full-time when I had my businesses.
But I would like to go back and enjoy retirement, spend time with my wife.
Too young to be retired.
We got to be aware of that.
I'm 39 too.
Oh, dude, you're too young to be retired, man.
We got to put that talent to use for 30 more years.
You can enjoy the time with your family.
Oh, my God.
But here's the thing.
I would like to, from a political standpoint, not have to do this because we have built something up that someone way more popular than any of us is involved in.
You know what I'd like to see happen?
Here's what I like to see happen.
Folks, if you're watching this, you're a libertarian.
Go tack Musk nonstop today, okay, with this.
I'd love to see a meeting between the main voices of libertarians with Rogan and Musk.
Just sit down and let Musk destroy you guys in any questions he's going to ask you.
And then if he gets to a point where he says, this shit makes sense, then for him to go and do what he did with the trolling stuff with Dogecoin and Bitcoin and crypto and all this other stuff, all of a sudden, everybody's talking about it.
Next thing you know, you got a bigger platform.
The next time you're running, but if you got those two guys backing you up, it's big.
The other thing I think that another person that may be a, I know you keep talking about Drew Carey, there's something special about Vince Vaughan.
Him too.
He's living as well.
Very.
I don't know how interested he was in really being like the kind of thing.
That hurts his business.
Yeah.
But I agree with you completely.
I also think that right now, there's a really unique thing that's going on that's really revolutionary that I'm not sure any of us exactly understand, even those of us who are kind of in the world.
But shows like this and like Rogan and Tim Poole and like a whole bunch of these other shows that are like really popular.
Like far more people are watching this than are watching the traditional corporate press.
And there's this kind of network of all of these people where a lot of really powerful, wealthy, really influential people are listening to these shows.
There's something there where libertarians now, we used to complain for years that we were kind of denied access.
They wouldn't have Ron Paul on CNN.
They'd black him out and all this.
Now we have this whole alternative outlets where we can get on and talk about the ideas we want to talk about.
And we've really got to be good at utilizing that.
That's why that's a lot of like my focus.
The Bitcoining of media.
The decentralization of media.
The fact that we can get on here and talk whatever the hell we want to say and not have to deal with the corporate overlords that are condemning what you're saying.
And if you get on CNN, which like I've been on CNN and Fox News and these places before, it's ridiculous.
You get like 90 seconds maybe to answer a complex problem.
You get three hours here.
Yeah, you sit down and view it.
I'm a two-hour guy.
I don't know if you noticed.
I had to step out.
But I want to bring up something important you mentioned when it comes to running community.
And I'm going to be selfish for a moment.
I'm running in New York State this year.
We should be more worried about people running this year because the impact we make this year is going to affect 2024.
I'm in New York State.
If I just come in a tight third, people will notice me.
I come in second and beat the Republican because my state's three to one Democrat, Republican, right?
So Republican's never going to win.
The question is who comes in second, right?
So if I come in second, that rocks my state.
My state becomes a multi-party democracy overnight.
Changes everything.
If I win with 35% of the vote, New York State goes from blue to gold.
That changes the entire nation.
Let me ask you.
Let me ask you a crazy question here.
Which policies, which philosophy makes more sense, libertarian or socialism?
Let me ask you one.
Hang on.
Let me ask a question a different way.
What is a more marketable philosophy to sell libertarian or socialism?
100%.
It's a great point.
Generally speaking, the left does very well with socialism because it sounds great.
The rhetoric is amazing.
Rich people suck.
Let's take tax the rich.
All people are going to be happy.
It's all going to be fair to say.
Explain successive AOC in your district over there.
It sounds amazing.
So they're right.
When it comes to rhetoric, the socialists are very good at that.
They're good at saying everyone's going to be fair.
Everyone's going to be safe.
All the riches are going to be.
It's fancy.
It is.
And it feels good.
I think it does go well, which is why you don't hear me talk about libertarianism.
I talk about solutions only, just solutions.
I want the person in front of me to go, oh, if they're Republican, you're Republican.
If they're Democrat, you're a Democrat.
That's what I want them to do.
I don't push philosophy.
You didn't hear me push philosophy here.
All I talk about is here's my solution.
I'm a candidate.
A candidate has to have.
They ask you questions.
Are you Republican or Democrat?
What do you say?
I would say independent, libertarian.
Independent libertarian is your answer.
That's what I say.
How much door knocking are you doing?
Me personally, not that much.
I'm out shaking hands.
I'm not knocking on doors.
I'm out in events.
Literally, I'm all.
How many events are you doing?
How many events are you doing?
Just I'm not, when I'll go back, I'll do three tomorrow, two on Sunday.
I'm two on Saturday, three on Sunday.
So far, none scheduled for Monday, but I do probably 15 a week.
15 events a week.
Give a take.
And the average audience is what?
How many people are you?
Low end, I'll get three or four, high end, I'll get a couple hundred.
Okay, got it.
So you're hustling.
You're going out to hustle in your profit.
I have to.
I've got to get 45,000 signatures that are legal, which means I have to get 60,000 to make sure that works.
So you transitioned where I was going and you brought it more to present today, which as a great marketer, that means you're good at doing that as well.
That's good.
What I will say is the following.
But you also, about an hour and a half ago, you said, in order for me to do this, I got to get registered.
And I need this much money to be able to do this, this, this, that.
Okay, great.
If I am hustling today, I would be so proactive to get in front of five influencers to get them to put up money and say, okay, great.
Guess what?
Here's 10 million bucks.
Here's 20 million bucks.
Hold on.
But there's two things.
And I'm talking an influencer, and I understand what you're saying because it's federal.
This is more state.
So you have to go more.
But if that guy does it on the national level, the local people are now saying, so now your presentation becomes, you guys hear Robo Mustit?
What?
Here's what must-it.
No way.
Yeah.
Seriously?
Yeah.
Here's all.
Shit.
I'm in.
Okay, what do we need?
Here's what we need to do.
We need to get more New York votes.
What you're saying, I'm literally doing.
Andrew Yang endorsed me, right?
So I am getting bigger fixtures to do that.
But the problem is most people aren't backing me yet.
You know why?
They don't think I can get in the ballot.
So why in the world would you back me, throw money?
And I've already raised six figures.
Like I've already raised six figures already.
So I'm already raising money.
So I do raise money.
But why would you, if I go, hey, Patrick, give me $40,000.
And you go, why?
You're not going to be in the ballot.
You're right.
I got to get in the ballot first.
When I get in the ballot and you go, oh, you're going to be in the ballot.
Okay, Larry, let me write you a check.
But there's also an amount of money I can give.
I've got to create a pack then if I want to get more than $40,000.
So there's limitations on how much money I can even take.
My average donation in 2018 was $85.
I raised half a million dollars and my average donation was $85.
What's that number?
85 times half a million.
How many people?
I don't know how much that is.
$6,000 would be $85,000.
So $10,000 would be $850,000.
So you got like 7,000 people.
But I had a couple of big heavy hitters.
I had a couple who gave me like $30,000, $20,500.
It doesn't matter, but you got $6,000.
So some of them give you $5, $10, which is great.
Did you guys see what happened with Musk with the Fed yesterday on Twitter?
Did you guys read that story or no?
The Fed, Fed investigating Elon Musk.
Oh, yeah, I heard about this.
Fed open investigation into Elon Musk.
If you make it a little bit bigger to read it, U.S. government has reportedly opened an investigation to Musk's business dealings surrounding his recent $44 billion purchase of Twitter.
The SEC is probing Musk's tardy submission of public that investors must file when they buy more than 5% of a company's shares.
The disclosure functions as an early sign to shareholders and companies that a significant investor could seek to control or influence a company.
So he was late 10 days, which Moo believed to save $140 million because the price could have been higher.
If the public knew about his ownership, 5% of the company, the case is easy.
It's straightforward.
Danny Taylor University of Pennsylvania accounting professor said.
But whether they're going to pick that battle with Elon is another question.
So you're already seeing how scared people are of this guy owning Twitter.
They're losing the go to Associate Press yesterday.
I don't know if you guys saw what AP said yesterday about Musk with pulled that up about the fact that here's Elon Musk who is fighting for freedom of speech, but at the same time, he was a person that targeted, no, not targeted, his attacked a lot of people on Twitter.
And do you want that guy to be the leader of it?
It's a very idea that that's a contradiction.
That he's like, look, this guy believes you should be able to say whatever you want on Twitter, but also he says whatever he wants on Twitter.
It's like there's no contradiction there.
Look, everybody's freaking out because basically what happened with the rise of the internet and social media is that the establishment lost their monopoly on information.
And this is why they were all freaking out for years.
And this culminated in Donald Trump being elected president in 2016, where the entire corporate press was telling you, you're not allowed to support this guy.
And then 63 million Americans were like, no, we're going to.
And so the response to it then was that the Congress hauled all the heads of the social media companies in front of Congress, explicitly threatened them that if they didn't crack down on fake news and hate speech, they were going to regulate them and all of this.
They basically got them to all roll over.
And this led to like this kind of censorship regime on social media where basically people get kicked off.
And this was really useful to them during the COVID stuff.
I mean, all of the doctors who were like against the lockdowns and against the mandates at challenging the vaccines, they all got banned.
We had Robert Malone on and McCullough and these guys, these guys, and then, of course, they went after Rogan when he had Malone on.
Like he's always spreading.
He's a great misinformation guy.
So now you have this guy, the richest man in the world, who's saying, well, I'm going to buy maybe not the biggest, but certainly one of the most influential social media companies.
And I'm saying no, no more of these rules.
So they're all freaking out about it.
But it got announced right after when he bought, when he first bought into Twitter, that they were looking at investigating Tesla.
Now they're looking at investigating this deal.
Yeah, now the federal government's going to crack down on him because he's committing the crime of threatening to allow American citizens to communicate with each other.
It's really bonkers to think about it.
That's a tweet right there.
If you pull it down a little bit so they can see the logo above, Elon Musk boasts that he's acquiring Twitter to defend freedom of speech, but he has long used the platform to attack, attack those who disagree with him.
Yes, no, that would be an example of people saying what they want.
Like what Dave said.
This is a, again, a symptom of a much bigger problem, which is that government has been using corporations to control what people can say so that they have some like degree of separation.
Oh, we're not censoring you.
It's a private company that's doing it.
Well, now here's someone saying, okay, I'm going to buy the private company.
They're like, no, you can only do that if you do what we say that you do.
Well, that means government's controlling it.
And taking an even further step back, this is in big tech, this is a marriage of the state of government and big businesses.
That's fascism.
That's literal.
That is the, you know, fascism gets thrown around a lot.
Fascism is when truckers, right?
Like fascism is everything now.
Fascism Fascism is disagreeing with the status quo.
Fascism, actually, in many cases, is the status quo.
And certainly when it comes to big tech, you have a small handful of companies that, in exchange for doing what the government says, they get the carve-outs, they get the subsidies, they get the licensing, the permitting, and all of that because there's such a high barrier to entry that was created by the crony class.
This is a perfect example.
We are all hinging on whether one person can buy one platform to finally let us speak to each other on the internet because there's not decentralization because government did that.
And then, anytime, even this was either earlier, no, it was last year or no, it was last year, that Mark Zuckerberg, who for the most part has gone along with whatever government has said on terms of service and community standards and all of that, but apparently wasn't being quite strong enough on people being skeptic about the vaccine mandates.
And so, Joe Biden and Jen Saki basically just both came straight out and said, Yeah, no, he's killing people.
People are going to die if he doesn't do this.
Well, and Joe Biden is president because Twitter censored the Hunter Biden laptop.
No question.
I mean, it certainly was a big part of that.
That was a big deal.
And they said that two weeks ago.
But that's right.
And that's the other thing that gets so lost as they're creating this Ministry of Information or whatever at the Department of Homeland Security here.
Is that on so many of these issues, the censoring side, which has always represented the powerful, has been wrong.
I mean, like, the most dangerous COVID misinformation that was spread over the last two years was probably, I mean, if I had to pick two that were clearly the most damaging pieces of misinformation that were spread.
One was that lockdowns contained the spread of the virus.
That destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans because they believed this policy or claim to believe this policy would mitigate the spread of the virus.
It did nothing to mitigate the spread.
And number two was the Fauciites saying that if you got the vaccine, you couldn't contract or spread COVID.
I mean, if you want to talk about what actually led to people's spread, how many people got two doses of the vaccine and then were like, oh, I can't get this now because I've seen Fauci tell me I can't get this.
Oh, I got the sniffles, you know, but it can't be COVID because there's no way, you know, I can't get that anymore.
So I'm going to go see my grandmother or whatever.
The most dangerous misinformation didn't come from Joe Rogan telling young 25-year-olds to be as healthy as they possibly can.
Like that's who.
And then the people who spread that misinformation have the nerve to go after him for saying stuff like that.
So the people who were censored were the ones telling the truth.
The post story is a great example.
Whatever you think of that Hunter Biden story, it was real.
It was obvious at the time it was real.
And the people who were telling the truth about vaccines and lockdowns and mandates, they all got silenced.
And the ones spreading the most dangerous misinformation were elevated by the establishment.
It's Tyler, pull up the Hunter Biden story since we're on it just to kind of bring it up so the audience sees what happened.
This is from Washington Examiner.
Hunter Biden and DOJ could reach settlement for a significant fine.
The federal investigation into Hunter Biden appears to be coming to a head.
The Justice Department is expected to make a final decision on whether to bring criminal or civil charges or try to reach a settlement that could include a significant fine in the coming months, said the report, which noted that allies of the president prefer settlement.
If prosecutors want to press charges against this 52-year-old son, whatever the decision is, Attorney General Merrick Garden will have the final say.
The rest of the report focused on Kevin Morse, a prominent Hollywood attorney, who lent more than $2 million to Biden that went to paying back taxes and supporting his family as well.
This could turn very ugly for these guys.
This is starting to come out here and it's not going to be too pretty, but it depends on who is.
I don't know if you saw yesterday, I got a message from James O'Keefe from Project Veritas.
Did you see who they had the whistleblower from FBI?
Did you guys see the FBI whistleblower last night at 11 o'clock?
No, this I met.
Crazy.
So it's an FBI agent who's the whistleblower, and they put the screen on him and it's black that you can't tell who he's wearing a hoodie because he doesn't want to voice is all distorted.
But he's talking about what their model is.
He's talking about why they came after you, James, why they're going after organizations, even though that's not the job of the FBI.
But now they're targeting people and we would talk about it.
He's giving the game plan of what happened.
So an FBI who's an organization that was supposed to be good for you and I with J. Edgar Hoover now is bullying regular people just because they're saying something that the government doesn't want you to know.
They weren't so good during J. Edgar Hoover's day.
And they were pressuring private companies to do the bulk of the censoring.
And by the way, there's one that's happening right now, and it's through censorship and disinformation.
I think it is eventually going to break and it's going to be something they can't contain.
That is a billion times bigger than Hunter Biden and even bigger than the vaccine disinformation and everything else.
And I think it's this.
We already know that the National Institutes for Health gave money to Echo Health Alliance to do gain of function research at the Wuhan lab in China, where they, and not just that, that in doing so, we know that they created at least one virus that became 10,000 times more deadly than it was when they started with the gain of function research.
And they were using humanized mice.
They actually put, I think they grafted human ears onto mice or something like that.
Or through something with the genes.
It's a strange look.
Yeah, it's a strange look.
But they do something with the human, they call them humanized mice, and it's how they do the gain of function research.
That now has it where it now can spread to humans.
And it was 96% similar to COVID, to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Now, we know that.
And what the government's response was is after first blocking it for quite some time and saying this is misinformation, this is a Russian hoax, whatever they were saying.
Then when it finally came out that it was true, they went, well, but there's no proof that that virus that's 96% similar ended up becoming COVID.
Okay, fair enough.
I don't really know how that works, how big of a gap that 4% is.
They were making viruses that were strikingly similar to the one that has killed over a million people in the U.S. and millions more around the country in the Wuhan lab, which is where this spread.
Now, go even further with that.
When SARS came out, the first SARS, because this is actually the second SARS, when the first SARS came out in 03, the Chinese government leapt to action.
The governments around the world leapt to action and they tried to contain it as much as they could.
And out of that, they said, okay, and we're going to put in, we're going to have, you know, a red line or a hotline set up.
We're going to make it so that if something like this spreads again, we're going to move even faster.
And then when this one came out, they arrested people for saying it was real.
They arrested people.
They arrested the Chinese doctor, I forget his name, who he ended up dying of COVID for saying that this was a new version of SARS.
That's not the action of a government that wants to be sure to contain this new virus and let everyone know about it.
I believe, I don't know this, but I believe that eventually the truth will come out that either the U.S. or another government, possibly the Chinese government, possibly the British or some other government, through Echo Health Alliance or a company like it did gain of function research in a lab in Wuhan that should not, that was not equipped to handle that level of essentially a bioweapon or a virus, virus that they were creating, and then it leaked because it turns out government is inept.
So you agree with the position Trump took to stop travel and all of that from during that time?
Once COVID was here, it didn't matter anymore.
Once COVID is here, the way that it spreads, it didn't matter anymore.
And that was something I said, you know, I think the one time that it might have made sense to do a temporary stop was with Ebola, because Ebola doesn't spread as easily.
So it's literally a person giving it to another person who might get it to another person.
And so that I could, I could hear the argument for that, even though you can easily screen for Ebola long before they get here.
But regardless, with COVID, especially now with these newer variants, but even with the original variant, the alpha variant, whatever it was that came, originally, it's already spread more easily than the flu.
So once one person has it here, any kind of mitigation of trying to stop people who might have COVID from, you weren't going to be able to do anything.
And it was here before.
We realized that it was here.
Yes, it would have been very hard.
Did you guys see the Daily Wire story about Fauci and Collins?
Did you see the royalties, the shared in secret NIH royalties totaling $350 million?
Did you see that?
Between the two of them in the 10-year period, they got $350 million paid out.
And the report from openthebooks.com said the royalty payments included at least 23 to Fauci and 14 to his former boss, Collins, who were paid out between 2010 and 2020.
I mean, these stories, the more and more they come out, this guy is unbelievably corrupt.
And look, Fauci was basically the head corporatist shill.
I mean, he was the guy at the National Health Institute who's making the decisions who gets grant money.
You know, like he's the kingmaker with taxpayer funds of who's going to get funded.
And so, of course, those guys who are doling out favors like that are almost always in these situations taking some type of other favor and return.
And I can just tell you watching the guy, it's just so obvious the way he's like, well, the answer to everything is you have to consume this pharmaceutical product from these pharmaceutical companies.
I don't care what your situation is.
What, you had it a month ago and you have natural immunity?
Nope.
Still need to go get boosted.
Still need to go get another one.
He's supporting, I mean, this whole thing was so obviously a scheme where you're like, wait, so the government is going to mandate that you have to consume a product made by one of these three companies, which are granted the intellectual property rights to make them.
And then you have to keep buying another one and ingesting another one of these products every six months or whatever it is.
And then the head doctor scientist guy is telling you that we support this policy happening.
By the way, it's all funded by taxpayer dollars.
So it's free.
You know, every one of these jabs is free.
And luckily, I do think this is at least falling apart a little bit where now you're seeing the data suggest that like getting this fourth booster gives you like six weeks of protection maybe.
And then like what, I mean, this is insane that anyone would.
By the way, a year ago, what you were saying was beyond controversial.
Oh, this would have been removed from humanity.
Now it's like, yeah, okay.
You guys would genuinely be like, maybe you can't put this episode up.
But I was saying this a year ago.
By the way, I was saying this a year ago.
My point is you would have been blackballed, banned, shadow banned.
Now you're like, yeah, this guy Dave's actually.
You were a point of what I wanted to make earlier.
What COVID did for many people was allow them to explode if you were already big.
But if you weren't already big, you were crushed.
Because I've been shadow banned like there's no tomorrow.
I mean, just my shadow banning is horrible throughout everything because I was against the mandates.
And the second I said I was against the mandates, all of a sudden my show goes down to every all my everything, I stopped growing.
I thought I was losing people.
I mean, and I'm blue checked.
I'm literally a candidate.
And they just shadow banned me like there's no tomorrow.
It's terrible.
So what did you do?
You went to parlor.
You went to.
I'm on all the things now.
I am TikToking.
TikToking.
And yes, I do everything now because there's no way I can get out doing everything.
Half of his money, the half a million dollars came from his OnlyFans account.
He's right now raising money.
I mean, what a strategic, very impressive.
I saw that story.
Don't you hate Arnold?
It's incredible.
A year ago, I was threatened with having posts removed and content removed for disinformation for saying that based on two things, based on the fact that the data that they were shared, what data they would share with us from the vaccines showed that its efficacy would last anywhere from three to nine months, give or take.
And the fact that COVID was not going anywhere, this was not, we weren't going to get COVID zero.
This was now an endemic thing.
Those two things combined mean there are going to have to be boosters for COVID.
Just saying vaccine booster COVID got me threatened with disinformation.
Yes.
Right.
Now, and even before that, saying that there was going to be a vaccine mandate would get you threatened with disinformation.
Absolutely.
We've been through multiple vaccine mandates across the country, including where you guys live.
And also, and where Jessica lives as well.
And then also, I mean, boosters are now get your booster.
You're not really vaccinated if you don't get your booster.
Maybe, and I know this might be a tough sell in this crowd, but maybe allowing there to be as many different people adding to the conversation, good and bad, might lead to falsehoods being ferreted out through better information.
No.
Maybe.
No, hold on, Larry.
Is that what Elon Musk is trying to do?
I know that before the show.
I know before the show that you and Dave endorsed AOC.
It's true.
But, but in private.
Caught.
But hear me out.
Maybe if we have as many people contributing to the conversation as possible and as many people being involved in it as possible and as many different sources of information as possible, we might have a better chance of sorting out what's true and what isn't.
And maybe the people who are, I know, but maybe the people who are in charge who have a vested interest in protecting specific narratives on every single subject don't want that to happen.
And it's really, it's hard to even like look back to like 2020 and it because everything moves so fast that you almost forget what happened.
The enormous propaganda campaign behind Cuomo and Fauci.
And that everything they were doing was just so noble and beyond question that you just couldn't even have another opinion without being this like evil person who just wanted grandma to die and all of this stuff.
But it was so new and so disruptive.
You didn't really know the answer.
Well, it's a lot easier to do that now two years later and after we've seen the vaccine.
So it was tough at the time.
No, it was.
It was very told in March 2020.
I put out a series of videos, which was, and I still have it.
If you go to my YouTube page, you can still find it.
It's a series.
It says COVID response, March 2020.
I put out exactly how we should deal with COVID in March 2020.
So it wasn't any harder.
That was two years ago.
That's when it first came out.
And I put policies down that were libertarian, that would actually make things better.
And we look back now.
They weren't perfect.
I didn't know everything back then.
But without question, everything I said to do would have been better than what we did in New York State.
It's hard to spot if you're not spotting the pattern.
And the pattern is crisis happens, either created or made worse by government.
Government steps in and says, don't problem, no problem.
Don't worry about it.
We have strong men and we have strong policies and they're going to fix all of this.
And all you have to do is just obey us.
And if you don't obey us, or if you even question obeying us, you're a bad person.
Okay.
And then when that utterly fails or continues to make things worse, they go, What actually happened is that enough of you, you didn't believe hard enough.
You didn't follow what we said hard enough.
You're out there spreading disinformation and saying things that aren't true.
It's your fault, which is why we need, or it's their fault.
It's not your fault because you're the good person that's listening to us, but it's their fault, the bad people who aren't, you know, going along with the program that's going to fix all of this if you just all listen to it.
Before we wrap up, two topics I'm curious to know what the position is with libertarian.
Taxes.
So right now we got, you know, put the number between 80 to 120, whether it's our national debt or unpaid or unmedicare.
So put them all together, 80 to 120 trillion dollars that we got.
A libertarian person, you become a president in 2024, you win.
What happens to our taxes?
What do you do?
Well, I mean, I would work to repealing every tax that I possibly could.
I mean, there's nothing the, I mean, if you're talking about the debt that we have, that's one thing.
And the only answer to that is to Essentially, cut spending and default on what we're going to default on because there's no way we could ever tax ourselves the hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities that we have coming up over the next few decades.
But look, my buddy Scott Horton, who's everyone here knows, is a brilliant libertarian.
He always puts it this way, right?
But if you're thinking about like the income tax, imagine we didn't have an income tax, we didn't have an IRS, and we were just living in like a free country.
And Vladimir Putin invaded, or let's say the Soviet Union invaded and conquered America, and they took over, you know, they created the USSIRS.
They said, now we have this organization and we have just dictated in this country that producing things is a crime.
Being a productive member of society is a crime.
And the punishment is a fee.
And the more productive you are, the higher your fee is going to be.
And we are suspending the Fifth Amendment.
You no longer have the right to not incriminate yourself.
You are legally obligated to incriminate yourself every single year.
You no longer have the right to privacy.
You must give us all of your information and we will look over it.
We will ruin your life if we want to.
We will destroy families, lead to suicides, go back 20 years if we want to, and demand all of your records.
If that was created, we would all very clearly go, we have been taken over by a totalitarian regime.
And this is not the way that free people live.
It is despicable in a professed free society that we have an IRS or an income tax.
I would abolish it as soon as I possibly could and then abolish all other taxes as well.
There's no need for any of this whole system.
And it doesn't even matter.
I mean, look at the way we print money and spend money.
It's completely untethered from how much tax revenue we raise.
What do you do with the debt you owe to China and Japan?
Well, I think that there's basically the whether this happens now or later, we are going to end up defaulting on this debt in one of several different ways.
Now, same like we did with the gold standard, basically.
This is what Richard Nixon did when he took us off the gold standard.
It was a big giant default.
We had made a promise that we would redeem our dollars in gold.
France was like, we want the gold.
And we were like, no, you can't have it because we don't have enough because we printed way more money than we have gold to back it up.
Now, whether we do this through printing money and just basically saying we'll pay back the debt, but it'll be, you know, with dollars that are worth much less than they were when you borrowed them.
That's a form of default.
That default also destroys your own economy in the process.
I think it would be much better off if we were to just acknowledge the reality of the situation, which is that this government is bankrupt, does not have this money, never was in a position where it could pay this money back.
The result of that would probably be our national credit rating being tanked, and that people wouldn't lend us money in the future.
So we'd have to drastically shrink the size of government.
Which allows you to do that.
That's kind of what I'm looking for anyway.
The idea that we can pay this money back without destroying the country is insane.
And to be honest, I don't think the taxpayer owes it.
I don't think the taxpayer didn't borrow this money from people.
Governments borrowed this money on behalf of the taxpayer.
This isn't like a true debt, like in a private sense, where you borrowed money.
This is like if you borrowed a whole bunch of money for your children, saying they'll pay back the debt, and then you just bought yourself a bunch of like jets and a bunch of nice boats and stuff like that and tanks.
And then they go, okay, well, does your kid owe that money back?
I'd say, no, they didn't borrow the money.
I don't think you have a right to say the next generation owes this money.
Well, and this isn't even, I mean, it's the next generation, too, but even the current generation.
If I walked in here with a gun and said, great news, you owe all this money that I just ran up.
But the good news is I have a new house, new car, new everything, yachts.
I started a war.
But here, you also, you now owe all this money.
You don't actually owe that money.
I cringe every time I see a politician go, we're America.
We pay back our debts.
Good, you pay it back.
We didn't consent to this.
We did not agree to this.
We did not sign this.
This is not an actual debt that is owed.
Now, another question is, okay, but without taxes, how does government fund itself?
And the short answer to that is they're going to have to fund themselves the way everyone else funds themselves voluntarily.
If you aren't a government or a criminal organization, and in fact, a lot of criminal organizations fund themselves through voluntary commerce, but the ones that don't, that are thugs like how government operates, they fund themselves through extortion and protection rackets.
And that's what government does.
And surprise, surprise that we don't get the best value out of a protection racket.
When someone comes in and says, great place you got here, be a shame if anything was to happen to it.
And then they rob you.
The end of that story isn't that they do a great job protecting you.
It's just that they don't break up your store and they keep charging you more and more and more so that they don't break up your store.
We need to force government to figure out how to get people to want to give money to it.
And there are ways to do that.
You can have direct fees for services.
You can have like a voluntary transaction fee, which would basically be like a small insurance policy on any transaction you do.
If you want to pay it, fine.
If you don't, fine.
If you don't pay it, you're not protected.
You can't use the courts to sue if something goes bad with that transaction or whatever.
And in doing it that way, government would have to make whatever that fee is worth it.
No one's going to want to pay a 40 or 50% transfer tax, but 5% maybe.
So now that forces government to actually live within its means because right now, government does live within its means.
Its means is whatever amount of money it tells the Federal Reserve to run up and lend to it.
We need it to live within the means of what we want it to do.
And the only way that's ever going to happen is taking away its ability to extort all of us under threat of harm.
There's a big problem here, though.
Most Americans are happy with taxes.
In fact, every time they do polling, no matter what it is, every time a year, whoever runs the polls, you can check one now online if you want to.
What do Americans think about taxes?
There's always a chunk of Americans who literally say, we're not taxed enough.
So Americans overall are okay with taxes.
So we have to change the American psyche on taxes.
Absolutely.
I think the first step is, believe it or not, simplifying all the tax codes.
The number one thing as president I would push is to simplify all the, I'd have to fight all the accountants, fight all the finance industry, fight all the tax prep people, but simplify the tax code.
You want a flat tax?
What would you want?
Flat tax is fine.
Everyone pays X percent.
As long as it's zero, I'm cool with it.
Well, that would be a good idea.
That's a Joe Jorgensen.
No.
But the first thing that's going to happen is that.
No, that's a Ron Paul line.
Joe Jorgensen's was, I'm cool with any new tax plan as long as the rate is 0%.
So but you want to make sure that the people will accept it and people are going to be unhappy if everyone pays the same rate.
It's just how Americans are.
So you've got to somehow say whatever is the poverty rate.
Say, for sake of argument, $18,000.
So any money up $18,000 is untaxable.
That makes people who are worried about taxing the poor feel safe.
After that, $1 after, say, $18,000 or whatever number.
I made that number up.
But say after that is now taxed at a flat fee, 10%, 5%.
I don't care what the percent is.
No matter what, that's the percent.
However you get your money in, that's the percent.
Number one.
Second, I don't want to take money out of paychecks.
I want people to write a check for their taxes in April.
That's how we collect taxes.
I want you to write that check and pay your taxes every year.
So you feel it.
I already do.
It sucks.
The average person.
It comes out of your paycheck.
That's correct.
I want you to go, I'm writing a check.
Am I getting what I want out of this?
That's what 1099 and business owners do.
Yes.
You know the crazy thing?
You know the crazy thing.
That will change.
We can do what they're talking about.
Do you know who came up with tax withholding and when he was on his deathbed?
He was the biggest regret of my life.
Milton Friedman.
Is that right?
Yeah, I know that.
That is the reason for tax withholding.
He created the withholding tax.
And he said it's the biggest mistake I made.
FYI.
In 1862, Lincoln said, we need money, folks.
He went and taxed America.
It wasn't a big number, 7%.
I think it was tiers of 3%, 6%, some small number like that.
Civil War.
He said, once we pay off the Civil War, we'll stop taxes.
Do you think taxes stop?
It did nine years later.
There was no taxes because we paid it off.
And then the next time around, 1903, all this other time, that's when everything else showed up, right?
Okay, so that's the tax concept.
Let's go to Roe v. Wade, right?
Oh, that's not controversial.
Yeah, let's end on something.
But wait a minute.
Pelosi just had a bunch of pro-abortion people in front of her house.
If you can pull that up, pro-abortion activists are protesting outside of Nancy Pelosi's house, accusing her of being complicit in destroying abortion rights.
This is a blaze story.
Where are we at with this story at the top?
A small group of, small group of protesters demonstrated outside of Pelosi's palatial mansion in San Francisco, California.
We're here because Nancy Pelosi and the whole leadership of the Democratic Party has been complicit, complicit with the fascist Republican Party that warrants to not only eliminate abortion rights, but gay marriage, trans rights, and a whole slew of rights, said the protest of the protests, appear to be organized by the far-left pro-abortion called Ruth Sent Us that demanded Pelosi investigate a Supreme Court justice in order to save abortion.
So what's the libertarian position on Roe v. Vay?
Roe v. Wade?
I think, by the way, it just reminds me, these crazy protesters turning on Nancy Pelosi.
It's like a monster she created that turns on.
Do you ever hear when John Kerry, he's on that secret recording where he's talking about the rise of ISIS in Syria?
And he's basically saying, he's like, look, we knew all the weapons and money we were sending in was going to ISIS, but we were going to use them to put pressure on Assad.
So he'd have to step down.
And then they just went into Iraq.
And it's like, no one told you to do that.
And you're like, yeah, I guess you can't control ISIS as well as you thought.
You would.
Yeah, that's a dangerous game to play.
But look, I think immigration and abortion are probably two of the issues where there are a lot of libertarians on different sides.
Personally, I'm pro-life.
So I'm on that side of that position.
So I'm happy with Roe v. Wade being overturned.
But I do also think that libertarians could probably at least understand, even the pro-choice ones, that when you have an issue like abortion where there is no national consensus, you have tens of millions of people who are on different sides of this issue and very passionately on different sides of this issue.
And then you have one federal edict out of the Supreme Court that says, this is the law of the land.
It doesn't matter what you think in your area.
Well, the result of that has been 50 years, 50 years.
This has been a white-hot cultural wedge issue that's never gone away.
And the result of Roe v. Wade being overturned would be that what?
The states can make up their own rules.
And it's a very, you know, like it's a very difficult issue to solve when one side sees it as the most fundamental right women have and the other side sees it as murdering babies.
Like that's a very difficult bridge to divide.
And I don't see any reason why the policy in rural Alabama has to be the same as the policy in Portland or Brooklyn or something like that.
I think communities should be able to decide for themselves.
Larry?
You guys want to skip this one?
You see, very quiet.
You've been very vulnerable until this one came up.
I want to let him say his peace.
No, I think the reality of it is if you're going to solve this issue, you have to begin to draw lines.
And people don't want to draw lines because you're saying, do you have one part that says, it doesn't matter, you know, no matter what, it's my body, my choice, up until the day before the baby's born.
And the other side that says, no, it is murder upon conception.
Somehow we have, there is a consensus.
The vast majority of Americans think that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned.
That's demonstrable.
Most Americans believe it should not be overturned.
Most Americans think there should be some limitations on abortion, but an abortion should be legal.
That's what most Americans think.
Now, in the Libertarian Party, it is very split.
You're totally right.
I know a lot of libertarians who are pro-life.
And their point is you're attacking a life, therefore that's aggressive.
You can't do that.
We have to draw a line somewhere.
That's really the issue.
Is that line, in my personal view, that line cannot be into the third trimester?
It's got to be before that.
But I don't know where that line is to be forward.
You have to draw a line.
And we draw that line.
It's going to suck for some people, but I think you have to draw a line.
Especially the babies.
Correct.
Yes.
I think you have to draw it.
Do you draw a line at a couple of weeks, a couple of months?
You've got to draw a line somewhere.
I think you simply have to draw a line.
And the consensus, I think, will probably be by state on how they will draw the line.
Some will just say, you can't have it except, say, rape or incest or something.
That'll be their line.
I think each state is going to draw the wrong line.
I think you have to.
It's the only way you solve it is by drawing lines.
Life begins at conception.
The question is, when does personhood begin?
And that's the problem, even within the libertarian movement.
Really, the argument within the libertarian movement is just a reflection of the argument in society in America and in every single, honestly, in many countries, is when does that personhood begin?
When is this no longer an extension, just something, an extension of the mother?
And when is this now an actual, its own human beings that should have its rights protected?
I personally consider myself pro-life.
I think that abortion is more often than not gruesome and regrettable.
I think that the talk of it just being this choice, I mean, we're talking about something that otherwise would have become a human being, whether we're talking about at the moment of conception or as its crowning, but before the actual birth has been completed.
This is something that ultimately would have become a human.
And I think that that gets lost on the pro-choice side.
What gets lost on the pro-life side is the war on drugs has created more drug use and empowered cartels to sell drugs and has the government sponsoring drug cartels.
The war on illegal immigration has led to the humanitarian crisis on the border and cartels being empowered and millions of people here illegally, both for good and bad reasons.
The war on terror has led to the government sponsoring terror groups and terrorists taking over entire countries like what just happened in Afghanistan.
The war on poverty has led to a growing gap between those who have and those who don't, a permanentization of generational poverty.
What do we think the war on abortion is going to look like?
Yes.
And that's not an open question.
We can pretty easily guess.
First of all, they're going to have to draw what that line is.
It's likely, just for convenience, that the line is going to, because it's hard to verify anything else except conception.
So it's going to get drawn likely at or near conception.
So now possibly.
I saw this picture the other day that I think, Spike, you may have liked.
So I saw this where scientists on the left are saying, look, there's atoms.
There's life on Mars.
This is awesome.
Right?
There's actual bacteria.
We found life on Mars.
And then on the right.
No, no, no.
That's not life.
It's not a life.
A person exists at birth.
It's not inside the mother.
That's why I'm validating him.
I'm showing that for him.
I mean, it's just, I was a, I used to be a pro-choice guy, and it was, I started kind of changing my mind on it.
And then it was after having kids that I really just completely changed and was like very pro-life.
And it's just, it's even the argument of personhood.
It's like, well, okay, I mean, if someone's in a coma and they're going to come out of the coma in five days, you could argue like they don't really have personhood in this moment, but you know what the future is going to be.
No, I'm not saying one person.
No, no, no.
I'm saying they had personhood.
Well, what would make a fetus, even after conception, not have personhood?
But here's the problem.
They have a unique DNA.
I mean, they have like, they're going to become a baby.
They might be at a different stage of development.
The point is, all these things, you're right, but the point is what you just said.
No, I wasn't disagreeing with you.
No, I actually agree with you on that.
What I'm focusing on...
Guys, can I just throw out a crazy idea for you?
I guess you know who's going to be able to do that.
I just thought a crazy idea.
But I'm anti-abortion.
So let me be clear.
Fair enough.
You have three men arguing with each other about abortion.
We have a lady here.
We probably want to get her opinion.
In general, and this leads to my question to Jessica and teeing her up.
Should men not even have a say in this?
Should this be an all-woman decided issue?
No, it's 2020.
21 babies.
Should women be the ones deciding this, not a room full of men in a back office, old white men deciding what women need to do with their bodies.
Listen, with those glasses you put on, what a gentleman you are.
I'm trying to be a gentleman here.
That was so classic.
Ms. Vaughn, what do you think?
Well, I think abortion should have always been a state's rights issue.
I don't understand why there needs to be some national oversight on the ethics for local communities on that.
So, but also, what was the question you just asked?
Oh, if men are allowed.
Okay, well, obviously you can't procreate without men.
So why should they not have equal?
I'm just putting that out there.
It's a weird thing as women have to carry the baby.
Yeah, but when you're a father, like, okay, yes, that is true.
Like, women, it is biologically true that women go through a lot more to have babies.
But the idea that the man has no stake if like your kids are not.
That's just a control.
That's a control mechanism to shut you down.
I was just going to say the Chappelle joke.
Okay, well, if that's the case, then I guess we should be okay with deadbeat dads.
They're making a choice not to be.
Yeah, I thought Chappelle's joke was the best to argue that.
Last but not least, Trump.
Well, I want to answer this one piece, if I could.
I am pro-choice, but anti-abortion.
What does that mean?
To your point, if I'm pro-life, I'm saying I want the government to make it illegal.
If I'm saying that the outcome will be poor women will be punished.
And I'm not about punishing poor women.
That's the outcome.
Ireland even stopped their banning abortion because the wealthy women flew to London to get abortions and the poor Irish women got screwed.
I do not want to punish poor women.
This is why I'm pro-choice.
However, I am anti-abortion, which means I will do things to ensure, and I promise as governor, there will be less abortions in New York.
I will do things to make things better.
For example, I will make sure that people can get contraception without a prescription over the counter, no matter what it is.
I will make sure their adoption and surrogacy will be simple and easy and cheap so that people who want to have a baby but don't want to have an abortion, there'll be families there to pick them up and take them easily that day.
No more adoptions in China, Romania, all in New York State.
There will be less abortions in New York State.
And the most important thing, which some people think is crazy, but I think it's very important, we should be taking all the money, energy, and time we spend towards fighting Roe v. Wade and put it towards artificial wombs.
Once you have an artificial womb that is functioning cheap, abortion becomes obsolete.
Well, marriage then also becomes obsolete.
I'm sorry.
Why would we have to have families at all if you have artificial wombs?
That's like brave new world territory.
We already don't have family.
Family's already broken up.
That's not because of artificial wombs.
It's because of many.
Well, that's just another step towards that.
Maybe, but I'm okay with it.
That one I'll take.
It just went from safe, legal, and rare and went all the way to the leading cause of death on the planet.
Yeah, so that's the leading cause of death is abortion.
And the black genocide, there's a lot of things that can be said about that on how that came about years ago on what the whole reasoning behind it is.
If you really go and study the history of it, it's not a good history, by the way.
It's almost like they want to keep that history a quiet history.
No, they do everything they can to not talk about Margaret Singer speaking to the KKK about how reproductive.
Very good point.
And to help minimize towards marriage, I think there's been two people who have been heavily campaigning to influence single men to stay single.
I think one of the biggest campaigners, her name is Jada Pinkett, and the other one is Amber Hurt.
So they've not been a big help towards that.
Well, I think the lesson is that it is, yes, make sure you don't marry someone like that.
But there's, you know, my message to guys is always like, I think marrying the right woman, which I'm fortunate enough to have done, is the best thing you could ever do in your life.
But the thing is this, right?
Crazy women like that, and this is crazy men too, or women out there.
You will get red flags.
The question is whether you're ignoring them or not.
There were a million red flags for all of the people in these relationships.
They chose to ignore them.
So it's just as simple as when you're dating someone, if they show you a red flag, you know, maybe ignore one by the second one, end it, and you'll be fine.
Last woman.
Last day single.
Libertarian dating advice, brother.
I have to.
You got to have him on on the podcast just to talk about dating advice.
Hell yeah.
You ready?
I've been married 20 years from a girl I met actually in high school.
And as part of my consulting, I actually have helped women in New York City get married.
So I'm happy to have that conversation.
That's a medal of honor now.
Correct, yeah.
20 years is the medal of honor.
Larry, can I book you?
Absolutely.
I've been married for 15 years.
Father Sharp.
I've been married for 12 years, and no one, including myself, understands why my wife married.
You all kicked your coverage.
Oh, it's not even.
What day did you get married?
What's your anniversary with?
March 27th.
Okay, got it.
Yeah, I married up too.
I'm with you.
I married.
So last but not least, folks, if you're enjoying today's format and the way we did it, and if you're enjoying the guests that we had on here today with the banter going back and forth, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel and make sure you go send this video on Twitter and put the handle.
Musk say meet with these folks and see if the libertarian concept makes sense.
Last thing, Trump just endorsed 11 folks, nine of them won.
Okay?
And you know what that means when it's nine out of 11.
That's great.
That's Steph Curry type of free throw shooting that you're doing.
Elections around the corner.
No matter how much shit people talk and say the guy's over with, he's running, 99% chance, and he's going to be the nominee for the right.
And there's a high likelihood he wins because DeSantis is not running, not this time around.
DeSantis is probably going to wait till running for 2027, 2028, and running this time.
I may be wrong.
It's my speculation.
Okay.
What do you stand with what's going to happen in 2024 with Trump winning?
How much different do you think the climate's going to be?
One, do you think he'll win?
Two, if he wins, how different of an America is 2024 versus when he won in 2016?
Well, I think that I more or less agree with your assessment.
I think that if Donald Trump wants it, I don't think DeSantis is going to challenge him in a primary.
You don't think he could be a running mate?
That's possible.
Would he be a VP pick?
I mean, that I could alphasm.
Yeah, probably not the best for Trump.
I don't know about that, but I don't think he'll run for the nomination.
Look, I think you have a base in the Republican Party.
A huge percentage of the base genuinely believes that Donald Trump is the legitimate president and that Joe Biden wasn't legitimately elected.
That's a huge percentage of the base in the Republican Party.
He is beloved amongst the Republican base still.
I think that nomination is his if he wants it.
And then I really don't know if Joe Biden ends up running for re-election, but it's either him or Kamala Harris.
Either way, the weakest candidate that the Democrats could possibly feel.
To be honest, I don't see how you have a Democrat president after 2024.
I mean, what do they have to run on?
They have inflation, media dominance.
Lockdown.
I mean, it just, people, it's like, look, we're the party who wants to kick you out of your job if you don't get a vaccine that doesn't even work.
We want to destroy your dollar, and we want to propagandize your six-year-olds with like sex education or something like that.
These are not popular positions.
And the truth is that Donald Trump running, man, is going to bring just a hell storm of media insanity.
And it'll be, I think, hilarious and weird.
But the country is at a very different place.
Donald Trump is older.
I mean, I know we got used to Joe Biden being so old, and he's really like 15 years older than his actual age.
But Donald Trump, what I've seen in the clips of his rallies, I think he's just like, he doesn't quite have the magic to me that he had in 2016.
I think he's a little out of touch with where his base is, a little out of touch with where the country is.
I've seen him like bragging about how he made the vaccines.
And the people in his crowd are kind of like, well, we're like not really.
That's not really our thing.
He's been fighting out.
We're kind of anti-Athemics.
I don't notice that.
So I still think he could win, but I do think this is a, it's a different landscape and a different dynamic than 2016.
So I'm interested to see how it all plays out.
81 million people didn't vote for Joe Biden.
They voted against Donald Trump.
When you combine that with the fact that, as Dave was saying, I mean, Trump has been booed a couple of times at his rallies.
Like, I do think he's kind of like kind of lost track of some of his base.
And it's his base that he relies on.
I think that if Donald Trump, if Donald Trump runs for the nomination, it is basically a certainty that he will get the Republican nomination.
I think that the only way that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, whoever it is that is the Democrat candidate, can try to change the subject from at that point the last four years of them being in office and the consequences of that, as well as bad policies that happened under Trump that they supported, like stimulus spending and things like that.
The only way they can change the subject is to make it a litmus test on someone that a good percentage of the country hates, like Donald Trump.
So I don't know if Donald Trump is the best for the Republican Party to run.
Now, even bigger, as a libertarian, you'll notice that none of us here tried to seriously say that a libertarian has a shot in 2024.
That is a problem.
That's why I started.
No, that's fair.
That's fair.
That's why I started You Are the Power is because we have to grow from the grassroots up to be able to make it so that one day there is serious contention for a Libertarian candidate in 2024.
Not with a series of lightning strike Hail Mary passes that all seem to work out, but with an actual feasible plan to be able to do that.
There are two pieces I want to bring up.
One is libertarian peace.
Libertarian Party's goal in 2024 should be to get electoral votes.
That's what it should be.
There should be gold on that map, whether that's Utah or a chunk of Nebraska, whether that's a chunk of Maine who splits up their stuff, whether that's New Mexico, whatever it is, Wyoming, there should be a gold piece on that map because that map is shown a bazillion times.
And that map is what will get us to be real so that we have a real shot at winning in 2028.
So we must get some type of electoral victory in 2024.
As far as Trump goes, I'm not sure Trump is going to run.
There is value in him being kingmaker, and I think he does like it.
He might decide to be kingmaker.
If he runs, I think he will absolutely win the nomination without question.
I think that's guaranteed.
But he might go, you know what?
I like being the puppet master.
I'm going to sit back here and endorse you, endorse you, you guys go.
He might say, I still think that's an option for him to do.
But I think if he does run, he'll make it.
If the Republicans run a DeSantis Gabbard ticket or something like that, DeSantis cannot get the left, but someone like a Gabbard or someone like that, whatever the person is who can get the left off.
Who's the second name you're saying?
Gabbard?
Tulsi?
Tulsi Gabbard?
Okay, got it.
Tulsi Gabbard can draw the left, right?
Anyone who drew the left.
If the Republicans get a DeSantis and someone who can draw the left, they will easily sweep it.
I think Trump can still win, but the issue is, will there be a culture war issue that will pop up that year like abortion is now?
If a culture war issue pops up, Republicans might lose in 2024.
If not, they're going to win.
The issues only will they, and the reason why I say it is, I know people in New York State, lots of them.
They are not Democrats.
Some of them I know are not Democrats.
They're Republicans.
This Roe, Web Wade thing popped up.
They are angry.
They are mad.
They are pissed off.
And it doesn't affect them at all.
In New York State, you are not affected whatsoever by this.
And they are angry.
So I think that's.
Who's angry exactly?
Women.
Republican women and independent women are angry at this, even though it does not affect them at all.
They're still angry.
So if there is a culture war issue that pops up, then Republicans may struggle.
No culture war.
Republicans are fine.
The other major issue.
It'll be a manufactured culture.
Well, they're wet on that.
The other major X factor is a hot war.
Some type of real hot war that develops.
That changes everything.
Two years away, you never know what's going to happen.
If that happens, we have to stay out.
Let them hash it.
I certainly would like to.
And I think he was more referring to either starting or conflagrating a Hawk war.
Yeah.
Because presidents in wartime tend to get re-elected.
And that might be a very weird president and interesting times.
Yes.
Very weird.
That's also true.
You know, and it's people on both sides are just kind of like, what the hell?
Let's just.
Everyone's like, when I was in military, I would in boot camp.
I don't know if you remember, we would count down the days.
Okay, how many days do I have left?
And you go, there's people in their closets no one sees.
They're counting down how many days are left with the current administration to get somebody else to take over.
Left and right, by the way.
It's not just like it's only people on the right and the middle.
Anyways, folks, this has been great.
Thank you so much for coming out, all of you.
I'm sure the audience loved the content.
I was looking at the commentary going back and forth.
And hopefully now, folks, you can make up your mind for yourself.
If this is something you're more interested in, let's put the links of everybody below.
Put the Larry Sharps and see his campaigning right now if they want to go find out more about him.
Yeah, Larry Sharps.
To go find out more about him and then stay close to everybody here.
We'll put all the links below for people to follow you.
More importantly, by the way, you look like a Hollywood star.
What exactly is that?
You were the photographer.
He was first on my show.
That's the picture.
Damn.
That's like you.
You look like a star.
That looks like a governor in New York right now.
Make sure.
Subscribe to the channel if you want to see more of this.
A lot of our viewers are just more pictures of Larry Sharps.
No, no, I think that's the picture.
Does it, though?
It's the picture.
It's all about the picture.
Who do we have next Tuesday?
Do we have Mark Murano, the author of Green Fraud?
