Jeffrey Albert Tucker is the editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a think tank that espouses the Austrian School of economics. He is the current webmaster for the institute's website, Mises.org. Tucker is also an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and an Acton University faculty member.
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| Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing very well. I have on the line and on the screen the innestable and eternally bowtied Jeffrey Tucker. | |
| He is an editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a think tank that espouses the Austrian School of Economics, or in other words, economics with a lederhosen. | |
| He is the current webmaster for the Institute's website, mises.org. | |
| He is also an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and an Acton University faculty Remember, he has extensive archives, which I'll link on the video, at Mises.org and LewRockwell.com and has written the scintillatingly titled, The Bourbon for Breakfast, Living Outside the Status Quo. | |
| Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for taking the time to chat today. | |
| Stefan, it's a pleasure to be here. | |
| I've been reading your work for years and looking at your videos. | |
| I'm in awe of what you've done to educate, what, literally millions? | |
| So, of course, it's a pleasure to be here. | |
| Well, thank you. Just before we get into some of your more recent work, I have a vague guinea pig theory about life events or perhaps people who influence The general public, dare I say, the slightly more intelligent general public or slightly higher foreheaded general public. | |
| But were there any particular influences you think that drew you more towards Austrian economics, free market capitalism, libertarianism and so on? | |
| Well, of course I was a student of Rand and Rothbard from early on. | |
| Those writers were the essential enemies too. | |
| In which we live, I also worked in many businesses, many jobs, and had lots of experiences along the way. | |
| Slowly, over time, you begin to piece things together and you realize certain things. | |
| You realize that the world can function on its own as a society, and the market doesn't need an organizing central force. | |
| And that's a brilliant insight, I think. | |
| I made sense of it thanks to Rand, Rothbard, Mises, and other writers along the way. | |
| Now, a lot of thinkers, young intellectuals, get a little bit stuck on the leap between objectivism to anarcho-capitalism, the idea of the sort of minimal night watchman state with the police and law courts and national defense. | |
| Was there anything that helped catapult you over to more of a Rothbardian approach as opposed to an objectivist approach? | |
| Well, of course, like for most people, it is a leap. | |
| It was a leap for me. And it occurred gradually over time. | |
| And finally, I kind of ran out of arguments for anything that the state can do. | |
| And I remember standing in front of Murray after I came to this revelation gradually. | |
| And I said to him, Murray, I'm beginning to realize something. | |
| There's nothing that the state can do, well, or that needs to be done that the state can't. | |
| He says, well, of course, that's exactly what it means. | |
| And I said, well, I guess I'm an anarchist then. | |
| And he shook my hand out. | |
| He took his hand out and said, congratulations, Jeffrey, I'm so glad to hear the great news! | |
| You've been cured! It has also struck me that Rand, of course, seemed to be quite down on anarchism, yet if you compare the Rothbardian ideal to Galt's Gulch near the end of Atlas Shrugged, the one thing that is conspicuously absent from Ayn Rand's ideal world is any form of government. | |
| And that's just a contradiction within her thinking that's a little hard to miss. | |
| You know, and you look at something like Mises, it's a generational thing. | |
| I mean, it was true for Hazlitt, it was true for Rand, it was true for Mises that none of them were anarchists, and all of them voted specifically against anarchism. | |
| I think for Mises, in any case, it was a kind of latent Hoxianism that survived in his thinking. | |
| There was a kind of fear, an intellectual fear, that said, look, if we get rid of the state, God knows what will happen. | |
| It'll just be a terrible mess. | |
| There's an Enlightenment-era kind of assumption that the state of nature is chaotic and dangerous. | |
| You know, it'll take us backwards. | |
| And they all resisted that. | |
| Iran, too. But I think what we've learned more recently, I think we've just become more sophisticated in this sense. | |
| Our own generation is more sophisticated than theirs on this particular point. | |
| I think that's right. And I think we have many more examples through the Internet age of institutions which can self-regulate without any external coercive agency. | |
| I mean, eBay, of course, is the world's most obvious example where you have, I think it's one of the largest single employers on the planet with hundreds of thousands of people making their living with no access fundamentally to any kind of law courts or any kind of status resolution agency. | |
| Simply on reputation and so on. | |
| And this would be not predicted by objectivist theory, but it works beautifully under anarchic theory. | |
| That's just one off the top of my head. | |
| There's so many free economies that are going on out there. | |
| There's a book that was written recently, which estimated that if you put together all of the free economic stuff, like all the stuff that I do, that Mises does, of course, that Lou Rockwell does. | |
| All of the stuff that's handed out for free and then relies on donations, it would actually, I think, be the sixth or seventh largest economy in the world, is free or purely voluntary. | |
| And that's non-contractual, non-enforceable exchange of goods and services and money. | |
| Not very well predicted. I think we have so many more empirical examples that it's opened up a lot more theory. | |
| It's worth exploring a lot more theory, given how many prevalent examples there are in the real world. | |
| In the digital world especially, it's remarkable. | |
| the whole thing organizes itself without any kind of coercion for the most part. | |
| All development occurs entirely privately and cooperatively among people all over the world in an unpredictable, wonderful way I mean, I was just thinking today that every day I wake up and there's some great new development. | |
| We have just about every single day on the World Wide Web. | |
| And why is that? It's because it's the most free frontier there is. | |
| It would be like this in the rest of life, too, if there were as much of an open frontier as the web is. | |
| I'm fearing, of course, that eventually we're going to shut everything down and get everything else screwed up on the world by the web. | |
| But for now, in any case, the development is remarkable. | |
| It would be this way in the whole society. | |
| That's one of the reasons it's great to look at the digital world, as you say, eBay, but everything else, too, whether it's Facebook or your own show, the fact that we're able to do this together right now, unthinkable 10 years ago. | |
| Oh yeah, this is all, we live in a Dick Tracy watch at the moment. | |
| Do you fall? | |
| How do you fall on the pessimism-optimism spectrum? | |
| I recently interviewed for the second time Doug Casey, Whose future philosophy or future expectations would be enough to draw the very breath out of your lungs as if an elephant is slowly sitting on your hope. | |
| And of course other people are much more optimistic about the possibilities of organizing and information dissemination through the web and so on. | |
| When you sort of look over the next few years, what's your level of optimism versus pessimism? | |
| Well, a little bit ago the internet went out and everything in our whole office shut down. | |
| In fact, all of life shuts down. | |
| That worries me very much. | |
| But, so long as we have digital communications, I am extremely optimistic. | |
| Just the other day I was doing The webmaster who designs a lot of our software is living in Shanghai. | |
| The guy who runs our music academy is living in Taiwan. | |
| I'm working with Indian software developers on e-books. | |
| I'm talking to you in a different country. | |
| You know, if we can exploit this global division of labor, there's no end to the progress we can make. | |
| And it's a glorious thing that it is globalized because we don't have an international state that can control us. | |
| So that permits us to constantly outrun We underestimated the power of human cooperation, especially across borders. | |
| The internet is breaking down the nation state. | |
| It's creating really something like a second universe of life for everybody. | |
| It's like we're all moving from the physical world to the digital world in this glorious way. | |
| Well, the state doesn't get control of the digital world. | |
| The state is so bound to everything physical. | |
| It's such an anachronism at this point in history. | |
| Which I think you point out in one of your most wonderful videos. | |
| It's an anachronism. It's working on the physical world. | |
| It's working on a New Deal style model. | |
| The world has moved on. So, if we can keep moving forward at this pace, yeah, I think we're going to eventually outrun it. | |
| That's why I'm extremely optimistic. | |
| It's just dazzling what the market is, what human liberty is able to do and show us these days. | |
| I mean, history is on fast forward. | |
| You can see it. | |
| I mean, we're living in the middle of an unbelievable revolution. | |
| I mean, our children, our grandchildren, and their children after them, will be in awe that you and I were alive in these times. | |
| You look back at the Industrial Revolution, it took a very long time for generations. | |
| Ours is happening, you know, right before our eyes. | |
| We get to see it every single time. | |
| Do we care? Do we understand what causes it? | |
| I don't know. But it's a great blessing to be alive. | |
| I mean, the fact that I've got this iPhone You know, this thing didn't exist a year ago, 5.4. | |
| It's unbelievable. Everything is amazing. | |
| I just hope that we start caring about it a little bit more, because in order to protect human liberty, we have to understand the relationship of cause and effect. | |
| To understand that it's markets and human liberty that are giving us all these things. | |
| Yeah, I think it's also people... | |
| I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, this is also why I try to write stories about this all the time and draw attention to the cause and effect relationships. | |
| You know, why is it Like, I have an article today on potato chips. | |
| Why are your potato chips fresh? | |
| You know, it's because of the amazing innovation of this bag that it comes in, made of old BP, and I explain how it's made and where it came from. | |
| And we take all these things for granted. | |
| I mean, I've written about lawnmower parts, I've written about tortillas, you know, I've written about every slip you can imagine, because to me, all these things, all these innovations are kind of minor miracles. | |
| That's probably not a word you would use, a miracle. | |
| But to me, it's like a miracle. | |
| And I want to draw attention. | |
| So we can love it more, appreciate it more, appreciate its source, and protect its source. | |
| Well, I think miracle is a very good term because there is an ineffability about it for any single human consciousness to understand how all of this stuff happens. | |
| I read an article a while back called something like, everything's amazing and nobody's happy. | |
| And what it was was the idea that you can get Wi-Fi on an airplane. | |
| I mean, that just blows my mind. | |
| And it was something like, you know, they said, hey, we've got Wi-Fi on the plane. | |
| And then like half an hour into the flight, the Wi-Fi stopped working because, you know, it's bleeding edge and whatever. | |
| And of course, everyone was like, Oh man, no wifi! | |
| That's terrible! You know, half an hour ago you didn't even know it was possible and now it's out for a little while and you're completely miserable that it's not there. | |
| So it's a miracle in that it's so much that we take for granted. | |
| We're sort of kept aloft. I always think of these bouncy castles with lots of balls in them. | |
| Like this helium updraft keeps all of these balls floating in the air. | |
| And it's only when one of them drops, as you say in the article, when you open your bag of chips. | |
| And they're kind of mushed and kind of, you know, unpleasant. | |
| And then you're like, oh, man, you know, something went horribly wrong. | |
| But we don't understand or appreciate and nobody can. | |
| It's not like we should. It's impossible to. | |
| But we really need to, I think, take that time during the day to just appreciate how much goes right in the world, because it seems like we're just naturally drawn to any sort of glitches or problems, which I think is kind of natural, but makes for a bit of a downward looking life. | |
| Yeah, you know, you should go to the interview yourself all the time. | |
| You do amazing stuff. | |
| But let me just say something about a subject I was looking into at the end of the day, scurvy. | |
| Now, this is a disease that killed something like 2 million people between 1,500 and 1,800. | |
| And that's just the records we have. | |
| You know, millions of people since the ancient world have died of scurvy. | |
| And it's solely because of one reason, the lack of access to vitamin C. I mean, it used to be one of those terrors that people were afraid of, like the black death. | |
| Well, do you know, scurvy killed more British sailors than any foreign army? | |
| There you go. | |
| It's extraordinary, yeah. So, I mean, it's been a problem since the beginning of time and solved through the combination of science and the market, crucially, because no government ever brought orange juice to anybody. | |
| It's the market that does this. | |
| And, you know, after I was reading about scurvy, I was at a hotel and just intrigued about its history. | |
| I went down to the breakfast buffet and there, what did I see but this huge A table full of juices. | |
| You know, it had orange juice and grapefruit juice and guava juice and God knows what other kind of crazy juices. | |
| And they were in vast quantities. | |
| You could take a glass of any size you want and pour and pour and pour and drink and drink and drink. | |
| And, you know, there it is. | |
| And, yeah, no, people aren't getting skirpy. | |
| But are we sitting around going, gee, isn't it great for the free market? | |
| Because thanks to the free market, I'm not getting skirpy. | |
| No, we don't. I think maybe we should. | |
| The interesting thing about the skirpy point, which I learned by reading on Wikipedia, People have variously forgotten what causes scurvy and how to cure it. | |
| It was known in the 4th century, then it was forgotten by the 8th century, then it was relearned again by the 12th century, then it was forgotten again by the 15th century, and so on. | |
| And even during the 19th century, the cure for scurvy was forgotten and had to be rediscovered again in the 20th century. | |
| Now, that's an amazing thing to me. | |
| But it was interesting to know because It's for that same reason we need to keep teaching the lessons of liberty. | |
| You know, what is the free market? | |
| What is it about? We can't forget this. | |
| Because knowledge can be lost. | |
| Unless we're aware of the cause of poverty and the cure for poverty, the cause of economic growth and the cure for depression, unless we're aware of the right thing to do in order to bring about the right results, we can face disaster again. | |
| We can get scurvy, we can come back again. | |
| And the statism and poverty and despotism, it can come back again if we forget how important human liberty is to the flourishing of civilization. | |
| So, that's what you're doing, that's what I'm doing. | |
| I mean, we're out there going, look, this is the cure, this is the cause and effect relationship. | |
| And we're doing this so that we don't forget, so that this generation It doesn't just take iPhones for granted and take the eBay for granted and take this technology for granted and act like it's a gift from God. | |
| It's not! All this stuff is man-made, but men need the liberty to make it. | |
| Yeah, I think also we tend to focus so much on the West and its history of, you know, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution and the battle between collectivism and individualism in the 20th century, particularly in economics. | |
| And we forget that countries or, I guess, continents like India and China are emerging from I mean, China more so than India, some pretty brutal totalitarian histories. | |
| India more with the socialism that was so kindly bequeathed by the British aristocracy under the Raj. | |
| And they have a much more bitter taste of statism than we do. | |
| The state has been able to be portrayed as vaguely benevolent in the West, Because it has been limited relative to other countries. | |
| So that's why I think philosophy and working from first principles is so important, because if you have to learn by experience, things have to get really bad before you change. | |
| And that's, I think, why in China they had to liberalize so quickly, because it was such a disaster under Mao and the other leaders. | |
| And yeah, so the pendulum's swinging more towards statism here. | |
| It's swinging more towards freedom in other countries. | |
| And that's what happens when you sort of bounce like a pinball off experience. | |
| Oh, that was really bad. Let's do the opposite. | |
| Oh, that wasn't really so good, so let's do the opposite. | |
| And I really hope that we can get enough principles out there that people can make proactive decisions rather than just wait for calamity to turn this ship around, at which point we hope it's not completely underwater. | |
| Sometimes even the calamity doesn't do it because people don't know what caused the calamity. | |
| That's why it's so important that we have theoretical works out there, like the Metaconic State, and Ram's Writings, and these sort of things. | |
| This is what explains the world's people. | |
| I talked to a guy from Poland recently, he's about 28 years old, something like that. | |
| And he was talking about, I asked him about socialism in Poland, he said he has a vague memory of it. | |
| He remembers long lines, and empty shelves in grocery stores, and his family doing it out, and rationing. | |
| And just a kind of a grey world of misery and suffering. | |
| He said, it's a vague memory, it's out there, but now Poland's like a regular country. | |
| When the grocery stores are full of stuff, there's jobs everywhere, there's big spikes, scrapers going up. | |
| I asked him, I said, how many people, young people today in Poland, understand what things were like and what caused it to change? | |
| He said, very few. Very few have any interest in this. | |
| And I asked him, I said, well, Suddenly, in 1985, all over again, the world looked and they said they would scream. | |
| It would be the end of the world for a whole generation. | |
| It would be the end of the world. So why is it that the difference between civilization and despair is really not that much? | |
| I mean, it's like you change a few things, restrict some human liberties, and suddenly everything falls apart. | |
| And it can happen again. | |
| Because it happened in Russia. It happened in China. | |
| And it tends to be a real snowball effect. | |
| I think if you just put a few things in place, so for instance, obviously, if you replace a republic with a sort of open-ended democracy, you set events in motion that are going to inevitably result in a Roman-style economic collapse or, you know, some sort of significant readjustment. | |
| And it's seeing, you know, the snowflake that lands on the top of the mountain that wipes out the village at the bottom. | |
| It's seeing that sensitivity at the beginning of things, the tiny little decisions that are made at the beginning of things that, you know, if you're sailing across the ocean and you change your course two degrees, you can end up in a different continent. | |
| It's that precision at the beginning that is so hard for people because most people don't see that far or can't see the domino effects of various things. | |
| So it's like, oh, OK, so they're going to put an income tax in in 1917. | |
| You know, what is it? It's 1% on taxes over, you know, on millionaires. | |
| But people don't understand that you put those things in place. | |
| The slippery slope argument is not always a fallacy, and people forget that, I think, very often. | |
| Well, I mean, you can think of so many examples, monetary policy, trade policy, IP, which is a very serious issue to me, but even things like the minimum wage. | |
| Okay, so Congress raised the minimum wage dramatically. | |
| You know, like 10 years ago, they put in this legislation that it increased Marginally every year, starting about five years ago and going up to today. | |
| So now it's very high, six, seven, twenty, five, something like that. | |
| Well, it's made a whole generation of young people completely unemployed. | |
| You know, people who are 16, 17 years old nowadays, there's about 10 to 15 percent of them that have jobs. | |
| The rest of them are not working at all. | |
| And it's because they're not worth seven, twenty-five an hour. | |
| I don't know what else to say. I mean, this is not complicated, right? | |
| So they can't get a job because nobody wants to pay them, because they're not worth that, so they're unemployed. | |
| And this is a major reason why unemployment is so high, but do people make the cause and effect relationships? | |
| I'm not entirely sure. | |
| Well, and particularly, I mean, youth unemployment is such a gateway to good employment when you get older. | |
| I mean, I don't want to sound all Dickensian, but I got my first job when I was 11. | |
| I was putting together newspapers and magazines in a bookstore, which is great because I got, you know, free books and you take the covers off. | |
| And I was pretty much working continuously since then. | |
| And those first jobs are so important. | |
| If you wait until you're out of college, your expectations, and you wrote about this quite well, your expectations about what kind of job you're going to get, that you can sort of leap over all of the jobs that are out there and sort of land in some entry-level mid-manager position without having gone through the basics. | |
| Of employment from a very young age. | |
| I think youth unemployment is so enormously catastrophic to people's long-term employment prospects that it's one of the most dangerous laws, all of the laws that keep the young out of the workforce. | |
| I completely agree. | |
| I'm actually terrified about what this means for this whole generation coming up with them and having a working experience. | |
| And then the terrible thing is, you notice this step in how the culture adapts. | |
| It's like, okay, the law shut the young people out of the market. | |
| Then the culture adapts and everybody says, well, young people don't really need to work. | |
| What they need to do is stay in school, you know. | |
| Work is just for poor people, for the working classes, for the immigrants or whatever. | |
| But my kids don't need to work, you know, because they're brilliant and they're smart and they're going to do amazing things. | |
| Well, you know, this is a terrible, terrible assumption because there's so much to be gained by getting out there and working. | |
| But if the law doesn't allow it, Well, I think you and I share an interest also in culture and the effects that both policy and philosophy have on culture. | |
| When I was a kid, most of the movies that I saw, when you had a teenager in it, the teenager had a job. | |
| It was just part of what you saw as a teenager. | |
| Now this doesn't really seem to be the case. | |
| You don't see I mean, they either have crazy jobs like Hannah Montana or, you know, they don't need to work because they're so rich because they are in the Gossip Girl world of infinite credit. | |
| But you end up with a sort of a wasted youth kind of approach to the media, which further reinforces, like, what's the point of having a job or if jobs are portrayed? | |
| They're portrayed so negatively as so bossy and domineering and pointless and we're so much above all of that and so on that it's given a sort of real stink eye, I think, to those basics of getting your first job and learning those basics, which they aren't basics at the time. | |
| And so the way that policies reflect culture, which then reflect back on policies, it creates this, I think, sealed circular world where everything that is enforced suddenly becomes justified and reasonable. | |
| Hey, let me ask you something. | |
| I was just thinking this morning about this. | |
| What are most kids told to aspire to in life? | |
| I mean, a lot of times they aspire to social leaders, leaders in politics, you know. | |
| And if you turn on the news, what are you getting news about? | |
| You're getting news about politics. | |
| It's always the state that's in the news. | |
| I mean, our culture is so completely dominated by the state. | |
| And yet, what does the state do for us? | |
| I mean, just nothing. What are we using every single minute of our day to actually fulfill our lives and make our lives great? | |
| We're using commerce. | |
| I mean, that's That's the cool thing in technology. | |
| It's the stuff human liberty creates that makes our lives worth living. | |
| So, you know, this is really disproportionate. | |
| I'm trying to come to terms with why this is. | |
| I mean, I write articles about this potential bag I wrote today, and people have been sending me emails all day long saying, thank God somebody has written about something that matters, you know. | |
| Well, it does matter. You know, technology matters. | |
| And yet it's not really covered. | |
| I mean, you turn on the news, and what you get is news about this stupid, stupid anachronism, what Doug French calls the dinosaur, you know, big and lumbering and mean and, you know, destined for extinction, but causing a lot of trouble in the meantime. | |
| One of the great things about going to work for kids is that they can experience commerce. | |
| And you know what? Commerce is a heck of a lot more exciting than the public school desk. | |
| It's like, if you get into the commercial world, even if you work, you know, an allegedly mundane job like, oh, fast food, that sounds terrible. | |
| I don't think fast food sounds terrible. | |
| Every time I go buy a hamburger, I think, hey, would you mind trading your life or mine, you know, just for like a week? | |
| I want to do that. | |
| I want to fry those great potatoes. | |
| I want to make that hamburger. It looks fun. | |
| All you people work like fun people. | |
| I want to work with you, you know. | |
| To me, commerce is really where the action is. | |
| But if you're not ever... | |
| If you're part of it, you know, in your youth, then you never really learn that. | |
| And then maybe you, instead of aspiring to do something productive and decent and wonderful, you do something stupid, like want to become a politician, you know, and lead people to the state. | |
| What a waste of a life! | |
| So, yeah, we've got to have kids out there in the commercial world to discover that that's where the action is. | |
| I mean, when you're in commerce, it's like you have your finger on the That's where the progress is. | |
| That's where the people are. That's where the minds are working. | |
| You know, the state is, by comparison, dead and stupid and boring. | |
| You get a sense of what the state's like by public schools, you know? | |
| I mean, they're stupid, they're dead, they're boring. | |
| There's an authoritarian structure where you're told to sit at a desk and just regurgitate what you hear, however irrelevant and wrong it may be. | |
| But, you know, that's a terrible system to trap people in, and yet that's all they know. | |
| It could easily be acculturated into aspiring to do things like become civil servants or politicians. | |
| And then we're attached. | |
| Yeah, well, certainly as the power of the state grows, state employment becomes that much more attractive because it always grows at the expense of stability and predictability and security in the private sector. | |
| And I remember I was an entrepreneur for, I don't know, a decade and a half or so, all the way through the boom and the bust. | |
| I got out just before the bust. | |
| It was a good fortunate decision on my part. | |
| But when you're in the private sector, particularly as the government is growing and particularly, of course, when you've got expansions and contractions in the money supply, which just it's like an injection of cocaine straight to the eyeballs of the free market because you simply can't predict what's going on in any particular way. | |
| Then people are like, wow, you know, the free market is kind of crazy and it's up and down and you're riding high and then you crash. | |
| Whereas in the government, you get all of these soft and fuzzies, you know, like public service, service, service. | |
| I mean, of all the euphemisms, right? | |
| As the government grows, more and more people want to jump onto that ship. | |
| And the sort of storm-tossed seas of the private sector become that much harder for a lot of people. | |
| And so the culture changes to reflect that. | |
| And then it's suddenly noble to be in public service. | |
| And there's something kind of greedy and materialistic about being in a market that actually serves customers. | |
| And the last thing I'll say too is that There is a humility involved in being customer-focused that you simply don't get. | |
| I mean, there's so much arrogance and entitlement in the state assistant. | |
| Because, I mean, I remember when I got a job as a newspaper delivery boy, I guess, when I was 12 or 13. | |
| I mean, you had to get the paper on time. | |
| People wanted it before they went to work or whatever. | |
| And you had to get up early. | |
| You had to do it. And if you didn't do a good job, then people would complain or they wouldn't tip you or they'd just cancel their service. | |
| And, you know, it doesn't matter what you say. | |
| It just matters whether the paper is in the person's hand when he wants it. | |
| And that's not the way the government works at all. | |
| So I think there's a lot of humility that comes into people's heads and hearts through working in a voluntary arrangement that is missed if you just kind of hope to get a good job after college. | |
| Yeah, and it's humility and it's also a kind of adaptability. | |
| You know, when you work in the private sector, there's something you learn, and that's that you have to be willing to change with the change in times. | |
| You have to be constantly upgrading your knowledge and your skills. | |
| You have to constantly be aware of what's going on out there and ready to adapt, ready to abandon old things and adapt new things. | |
| And change, and learning new software all the time, constantly reinventing yourself so that you can make yourself useful to society. | |
| And you get acculturated to that, and it becomes kind of fun. | |
| I mean, that's part of life, is change. | |
| But you notice, these days, There are so many people who complain about the technological revolution, for example. | |
| Oh, God, I don't want to have to learn some new software. | |
| Oh, geez, what's wrong about the computer? | |
| Yeah, it may be ridden with viruses. | |
| I don't want a new computer. I don't want to change. | |
| Now, where do people get this attitude that somehow we can just go through all of life being exactly the same? | |
| Besides that, why would we want to be that way? | |
| I mean, why would we want to live a static existence? | |
| Some of it, I think, is that there's a kind of a status mentality that's afflicted people. | |
| You know, even today, people over a certain age are burrowed down in this kind of view that the world should just be static and unchanging and I'm not going to adapt to it. | |
| Well, in the private sector, it's a great thing because it teaches you that you must constantly be adapting. | |
| You must always be evolving as a person. | |
| You must never stop the environment. | |
| You must always change. | |
| I think that's true. And the one thing that I have found as well with technology is that it has increased the value of philosophy because it's outsourced memory. | |
| So you don't really have to remember as much anymore because you've got your wikis and Encyclopedia Britannica. | |
| You don't have to use much of the grey matter to remember anything anymore. | |
| Maybe it's because I'm over 40 or whatever, but the number of times I find myself looking up the most obvious things again, it's because you don't need to, right? | |
| Because there's so much more information that's out there, you need some principle by which you're going to select what you're going to look at and why. | |
| Because memory has been outsourced, you have that much more brain matter, I think, available for thinking philosophically or from first principles. | |
| Whereas I think a lot of our brains in the past kind of had to be consumed by memory. | |
| We've got a lot more flexibility, a lot more room for different gas in the tank, so to speak. | |
| And I think that troubles some people because it exposes a void in their principles. | |
| If they have that much more access to information, a lot of people feel overwhelmed by information. | |
| And of course, if you don't have any principles by which you're going to organize this massive information, it does seem overwhelming. | |
| And I think that's another pushback people have about technology. | |
| Yeah. Hey, I gotta tell you, it was funny that you should bring this up. | |
| The other night I was at dinner with my kids and I said, because I was thinking about the scurvy thing and thinking about it, and I said to them, I said, does anybody here at the table know what causes scurvy? | |
| And my little girl guessed, I don't know, is it C-signets, you know? | |
| And my son said, excuse me just for a second, I'll be right back. | |
| I've got to run to the bathroom. So he came back about 30 seconds later and I said, okay, do you know what causes scurvy? | |
| He said, oh yeah, sure, vitamin C deficiency. | |
| It doesn't matter. And I looked at him and said, that's amazing that you know that. | |
| And then I saw that, of course, he had his iPhone in his hand. | |
| And, you know, it's funny. | |
| Even now, I'm still having a hard time adapting to the point that you just made. | |
| That, like, there's so much that's out there. | |
| We don't actually have to carry around a bunch of nonsense in our heads. | |
| We can think seriously. That's a beautiful point. | |
| The world's changed dramatically. | |
| And in a wonderful way. | |
| I hope we use that extra space we have in our brains as well for philosophy, for thinking about how the world works and for doing serious work like that. | |
| I hope that we don't squander it. | |
| Well, we can certainly do our best to help that along. | |
| Now, as the webmaster, and obviously I believe you should have done the interview in a cape and a hat and some sort of Hogwarts wand, but as the webmaster for Mises, which again I can't recommend highly enough, is a fantastic resource. | |
| I mean, the amount of stuff you guys put out there for free is wonderful. | |
| What's coming up that people can look forward to? | |
| What sort of new Fandango toys are you getting out? | |
| Is it going to go 3D stereoscopic? | |
| Are we going to have flight simulators through Ludwig von Mises' brain? | |
| You do a lot of technology work yourself and you know how hard it is. | |
| Development is really hard. | |
| It's a constant struggle to stay Just recently we put media on the front page videos that have just boosted traffic like, I don't know what. | |
| We've got a new Mises Wiki that now has about 700 articles on it. | |
| Those are constantly in development. | |
| I don't know if you know about the Mises Academy that we've opened up, the online classroom where people come in through an environment just like this and they study with these very smart guys. | |
| This guy's a lot smarter than I am, and they have them for six or eight weeks. | |
| You hire a professor to teach economics or whatever. | |
| I guess we opened up the Mises Academy last year at this time, and we've had about 2,000 students come to it, so it's pretty wonderful. | |
| But I must tell you, just yesterday, I was working with our warehouse in Atlanta about the delivery of books, physical books and e-books. | |
| We now have about 150 e-books or something like that, and about 400 books in the store. | |
| We were sitting around a table just doing an intellectual session, just trying to decide what are our needs, where do we need to go. | |
| And I had a revelation, and I'm not sure if I want to go into the details of it, but let me just say that I vaguely now have a glimpse of how we can do another two to four to five hundred books in print, and also in e-books sometime but let me just say that I vaguely now have a glimpse of how we can do another That's fantastic. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| I mean, it happens... | |
| You know, Stefan, if this happens, it means that the whole library of freedom can just be a piece of paper. | |
| I mean, like, everything. | |
| Right now we have the main stuff. | |
| But I mean, like, everything. | |
| You know, all of Jevons' work. | |
| Who cares about Jevons? Well, I don't know. | |
| There are a few people out there. | |
| Their desires should be fulfilled. | |
| And we're close to actually achieving that. | |
| That was a very exciting thing. | |
| I drove to Atlanta to just look at the warehouse, see what's going back, going up. | |
| I came back with my head exploding with the possibility of what might actually happen in the future. | |
| So, very fired up about that. | |
| I was sorry, just wanted to, while you mentioned that, I would also recommend something to you, you know, just Propellerhead to Propellerhead, which is that you have a number of books that are obviously available as ebooks, but are not available as audio files. | |
| And, of course, there's lots of fantastic software out there that's really come a long way in the last few years for converting text to speech. | |
| And it may be worth firing a couple of those through and making them available as relatively low-quality podcasts because, you know, people would generally much rather listen than read. | |
| And that's just something I wanted to sort of – you can automate that process so that you can get these files. | |
| For some years now, and I've been waiting to find a technology that has reading skills that's really comfortable on the air. | |
| I haven't seen it yet. | |
| I mean, it seems like we're, like, this close. | |
| I'll send you a link to a software that I use. | |
| When I write a book, I dictate generally. | |
| I don't like to type as much anymore. | |
| I dictate and then I have it read back to me. | |
| So if I'm working out or whatever, I can listen to my book and see if there's anything in terms of the flow or whatever that needs to be changed. | |
| So anyway, sorry, I don't want to bore the people who are interested in this, but I'll send you the link to the software that I use. | |
| I think you'll find it's actually, and a couple of samples, I think you'll find that it's actually quite pleasing to listen to. | |
| Yeah, I want to tell you, from a point of view of, and I should say that I'm not technically the webmaster. | |
| I'm probably better seen as the development director or the web editor or something like that. | |
| There's a code monkey out there who lives in Shanghai, and his name is David Dexter, and he's an unbelievable genius. | |
| And he's the master of the code behind, and I think he probably deserves the title of webmaster. | |
| But... Oh God, I forgot my hands on here. | |
| Well, sorry, do you mind? | |
| I have one more question that I'd like to ask you, if you don't mind, just before we sign off, if you have another few minutes. | |
| Yeah. And if it's not too personal, I mean, it's on your wiki page, so I assume it's not too, too personal, but I was quite interested in your conversion to Roman Catholicism. | |
| If I understood the dreadlock picture beforehand, it was from Rastafarianism, which seems like quite a stretch, and If you don't mind, I'm always curious about people's spiritual experiences. | |
| I've not had any fortune that way in my life, but I'm always really interested in people's spiritual experiences. | |
| If you could spend a minute or two just talking about what happened and how and why, I would be quite fascinated if you don't mind sharing. | |
| Not at all. I mean, one never knows why these things happen ultimately. | |
| I can tell you the circumstances. | |
| I enjoyed very much the liturgical music of the Catholic Church, and that drew me very close to the faith itself. | |
| And by the liturgical music, what I mean is mainly the orange hat and its offshoots of the Renaissance. | |
| And, you know, someday I'll write a definitive article that relates music of the Renaissance, the polyphonic music of the Renaissance, to anarchist political theory, because I think there's actually a close relationship there. | |
| But I haven't written it yet, so maybe it'll happen at some point. | |
| I don't know. But, you know, I find the thinker policies and the emphasis on natural law, on the scientific inquisitiveness of the tradition, that sort of love of science, that fearlessness of research that you find from the Renaissance thinkers, the beauty, all of these aspects. | |
| And, of course, I should add, too, that I was attracted to it in regards to its truth value. | |
| And certainly, I mean, I think you and I share an appreciation for Thomas Aquan, you know, for example. | |
| Absolutely. So, conversions are too complicated to ever explain in something like a quick video podcast like this. | |
| But anyway, I hope that gives you some indication. | |
| It really, really does. | |
| And again, I just wanted to remind listeners and watchers to check out Mises.org and I'll put the links to your articles. | |
| And I really do appreciate you taking the time. | |
| It was a really enjoyable chat and I hope to have another conversation again soon. | |
| Oh, I hope they do it again too, Stephen. | |
| It was really fun. Thank you so much for inviting me. |