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July 25, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:54
2181 Stefan Molyneux and Jeffrey Tucker at Freeeeedomfeeeeest!
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Time Text
Rolling.
So, we're here.
Our dream has been achieved, Stefan.
We're going to break into dance.
That's our whole lives.
That's right.
We're all set.
Fulfilled.
We are here at Freedom Press 2012.
Right.
At the fabulous laissez-faire book cathedral of print.
I think that's the original tagline, isn't it?
Well, but you know, you look at our spread, it's pretty impressive.
It's great.
And I've got to tell you, these books, I literally could read all of them.
And so, laissez-faire books, LFB, Lfb.org.
Also a little pitch in too.
I just signed up for the memberships.
If you want your nude pics of Jeffrey Tucker, it's really the only place to go.
And for a premium membership, they won't send them to you.
I think that's their incentive to upsell.
But no, I highly recommend it.
Ten bucks a month, you get...
Ten bucks a month, yeah.
Unlimited numbers of...
We're releasing every week, and you get the whole archive with it, so people are very surprised.
Basically, I describe it as a bar with small cover charts and then the drinks around the house.
Yes, absolutely.
It's a little pitch, but it's really recommended.
So, how are you enjoying your Freedom Fest?
Well, you know, what I was going to say about Leslie Frey books have been very impressive for me since I've been here.
I can tell That the institution is back on the map.
You know, I've met a lot of club members here.
People are talking about Leslie Faber.
It's surfacing like a long whale, a long-former whale.
Yeah, something like that.
Spraying its mucus of liberty.
And it's good.
And we need a publisher.
You know, the liberty movement, such as we want to call it, needs a house, you know, organ, the publisher work.
And so I'm getting manuscripts all the time.
It's really cool to be here.
You know, there are many now large-scale, fairly large-scale libertarian kind of conferences like this, right?
This is probably the biggest.
This is the mecca.
This is the mothership, yeah, for sure.
And it's got much more, say, bourgeois feel than maybe some of the others, but...
Fewer hippies.
Yeah, fewer hippies, more Republicans.
But, you know, it turns out that libertarians are a diverse law, and we're not all the same, and that's cool.
Yeah, and it's a good mix of political strategy, social strategy, some philosophy, some good debates, lots of financial stuff, which I, you know, for a lot of libertarians and Republicans.
Which is cool.
You know, that's nice too.
I've come to appreciate financial stuff because these people are really using their property in ways.
There's a test in the financial world.
Yeah, there's a practical application of philosophy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, yeah, Rand Paul's, I think, talking tomorrow.
Peter Schiff was talking today.
Josh Napolitano.
Yes.
Yeah, and I heard Schiff.
At first, he's always amazing.
Yeah, he's a great speaker.
And Napolitano's fantastic, too.
And Goodman's here, I guess.
I mean, there's, like, everybody's here.
Yeah.
Fee has a nice table over there.
Look, it's just a place to meet lots of new people, to connect, you know, some people who've known you maybe from your videos or writers that meet you for the first time.
So you make all these kind of personal connections.
I really think that a meeting like this does good, don't you?
Oh, totally.
Yeah, because you kind of make a sort of personal contact.
Yeah, I mean there's the cheesy terms like schmoozing and networking and so on, but I think There's so much that you can get meeting somebody face-to-face, eye contact, body language, just who they are as a person.
You can't get that digitally nearly as much.
That's right.
When I used to be a head of R&D at a software company, we would just be working night and day, night and day on code.
And at one point, one of the programmers said, oh man, it's time to go out into the big blue room and meet the flesh people.
And he meant the sky, you know, like a big blue sky in the big blue room and meet the flesh people.
And that's sort of how I feel when I meet people that I've had digital relationships with.
It's real nice to just be a person in the room with somebody else and chatting.
Well, I'll tell you something else.
Because, you know, the libertarian movement, again, a movement.
It's famously contentious, filled with factions and people who like to start fights with each other.
If you meet these people once a year...
Internet coverage dries away.
Yeah.
I mean, you begin to realize, oh, that's a human being.
Maybe my problem with this person's writing is not that he's evil, but that maybe I disagree with something to say.
Right.
And in which case your tone changes.
So yeah, having this human context, I would say that it makes us a more civil society.
Well, I think that's where you come from, that perspective.
My major goal and approach here has been to try and sow the seeds of discontent in as many factions as possible.
You're the source of the whole problem!
I've been spreading as many lies about people as possible.
I've been talking about how other people are talking trash about you behind your back.
I've invented websites full of slander that I've been handing out to people.
I'm really, because I'm not headlining here as a speaker this year, I'm taking my vengeance.
It's your way of kind of working out.
Yeah, I'm taking my vengeance where I can.
So it's a divide-and-conquer approach for me.
The good thing about your approach, Stefan, is it's almost, I think it's going to make room for you next year.
They're going to headline you next year and be very nice to you.
Yeah, because nobody will be talking to each other.
And I will have, I'll be like the body of the spider of discontent, fingers everywhere, and that's really my approach.
Now, this really is your first time to freedom test, right?
Yeah, it is, it is.
It's been very nice.
Actually, I had a minor pitch, so I was doing an interview with someone and a couple of people were listening and saying, man, that was great.
That was better than any of the speakers I saw.
I'm available at freedomainradio.com.
Host at freedomainradio.com.
No, I mean, but also looking at the list of speakers, it's a pretty good group, so I don't feel too bad.
It's impressive.
And we've got our gig tomorrow.
Tomorrow at 10.30?
Yeah, because I'm going to upload this tonight.
Okay.
So yeah, we're going to talk about new ways to approach the degree.
And I don't think we've even talked to each other really about what each of us is going to say.
No.
I mean, I kind of hinted like we need to come up with some fresh ideas here.
I think my approach would be we each contribute one word.
And just see where it goes.
Oh, and then just knit it together like a dance.
And then just make it as hard as possible for the person to follow.
Well, that'll be amusing for us.
I don't know about the audience.
Oh, there'll be an audience?
Oh, that's a different matter then.
No, we've got a lot of things coming.
Okay, so we've got Bob Murphy.
The great Bob Murphy.
You get a chance to see what he did as the host of the roast of Christopher Lawless at Porkfest.
I don't think it's uploaded yet.
Wait a minute, this is just the other day?
A month or so ago.
He was fantastic.
He is a funny guy.
He roasted me the year before.
Killer.
He's got a dry sense.
He's like a viper.
You know, like venom.
Just so much venom that my entire skin turns streaked like some sort of choleric Klingon.
It was just horrible.
But he's very, very funny.
He did a great job of hosting and, of course, he's a great speaker.
So he'll be talking.
Wendy McElroy.
Yep, she's got a new book out.
Let me get it.
Let's show the people.
Yeah, because it's very good.
Listen, I think there's something very wonderful about this book.
It's very practical, kind of libertarian.
It's philosophically sophisticated, but very practical and realistic and humane.
The Art of Being Free.
Yeah, and it's not an overly big book, but I tell you, the appendix in there I had wet, soggy eyes by the time I got to the end.
You know, it really touched me very deeply.
The appendix.
It's very powerful.
It's a healthy leader.
It's very good.
That's not usually where an author puts their best work, you know?
I mean, no, but it's like it took her a long time to kind of get something fun at the end.
And you, of course, and me, and...
And Jacob Hubert, who wrote Libertarianism Today.
He's an attorney in Chicago, and I think he's going to be talking about alternative legal systems, which is one of the most innovative parts of Libertarianism online.
We're getting more and more of these kind of online judicial services that are available.
Mediations and conflict resolution.
We're going on at 10.30 and then again at 11.30, right?
Doug French is talking, too, or he's moderating things.
So yeah, we've got, and I think we each have two minutes, we have a panel.
And there'll be Q&A. I've certainly heard a lot of buzz about it.
I think a lot of people are going to come.
I hope so.
There's a lot of competition here.
We've got all the big institutions.
I mean, in many ways, the whole of The world of liberty is representative of this conference.
Yes.
And by the way, let me say something really nice about Mark Skouser, who put it together.
And why did he put it together?
First of all, he wanted a conference to work on a kind of for-profit model.
He really wanted...
To build within the structure of this event an expansive sort of desire to include as many people as possible, which is what commerce does for you.
Commerce puts aside your grudges and makes you look for opportunities.
Can you put some assets in the seats?
You're in!
Yeah, that's right.
So that's Mark Skousen.
He wanted to make it for a profit.
And he wanted a place, he told you this, Where people could find commonalities and friendships.
And where there wasn't all this, you know, non-factionalism.
And I think he's done it.
It's a very warm and happy environment.
And you go into that main hall, it's startling, actually, to see.
But more than 25,000 people are gathered in one place listening to the talk.
I sort of really believe in that sort of collective energy thing.
It works.
I feel giddy here.
I know, I know.
I feel giddy.
This is a huge...
It's huge and I don't have to watch what I'm saying.
I'm not going to get involved in some really complicated, messy, philosophical or political discourse with a muggle or something.
No, you've been scandalizing everybody for two days.
I mean, say it outrageously.
So I think it's just a drink in the energy I find here is just fantastic.
It really is the first conference that I believe has been held on the surface of the sun.
And just technologically speaking, what is it, 46 degrees yesterday?
That is new.
Yeah, that is new.
It was amazing.
The first night I got here, you know, just walk out.
118 Fahrenheit.
But it's a dry heat, so you don't melt, you just burst into flames.
We just kind of turn brown like a biscuit.
No, it's really great.
The hotel is nice.
The pool is fantastic.
Everything is great.
Las Vegas is filled with fascinating things.
I mean, it takes you a while to get the hang of the city.
It's not really sinful.
It just sort of pretends to be sinful.
It's sensual.
Yeah, sensual.
It's okay.
It's just bourgeois fun.
The whole city is like this.
But you can go over the...
What's that big hotel?
The whole Rome thing.
Oh, Caesar's Palace.
Caesar's Palace.
And there's certain places you can...
Go and hang out in the house.
You can pretend like you're really in Rome.
I mean, they have a poliseum and statues.
I love it.
And in so many ways, it's a consumer-oriented city.
Right.
And like overtly so.
It's all about, you know, the customer.
It's all about facing the customer.
I love being a customer in Vegas.
I mean, the service is fantastic.
Everything is great.
Everybody loves you.
The deals here are pretty good, too.
I mean, I know it's been pretty hard hit by the economy.
Well, I don't know what you like to shop for, but I like Chotsky's.
I like cheap Chinese Chotsky's.
And those are my favorite shops.
Do you know, can I tell you something, Jeff?
The first time that you mentioned that, I could have sworn, and I would have laid good money on the fact that you were saying Chotsky's.
The few small Trotskys.
It's like, no, no, they embalmed the other guy.
They embalmed Lenin, not Trotsky.
You can't get them.
But you don't know the term Trotsky?
I know it now, yeah.
It's like a British firm, yeah.
But I thought you meant Trotskys.
No, they're like knickknacks.
I don't know what other word you...
I mean, stuff you buy.
Brick-a-brack.
Yeah, stuff you buy, you kind of regret.
White out of Wednesday also called it sometimes.
Yeah, it's silly things, yeah.
I can't resist them.
They go on a shelf somewhere, and you look at them every three years when you've got a company.
What am I going to do?
They say, well, I bought it, might as well keep it, you know, that kind of thing.
But I can't resist them.
I get into these shops and there's several shops that have exactly the same tchatskis in three different places.
And I swear to you, and I only know this because I was with the person who planned this out to me, I went in the first shop and looked at every item with amazement.
And we left.
And then I went to the next shop and looked at the exact same items again with equal amazement.
And I did it yet a third time at the third shop.
I like all this stuff.
So what you're saying is your short-term memory is shy.
You come to Vegas and whatever it is in the water or in the drinks is completely shy.
Hi, I'm Stefan Molyneux.
Pleased to meet you.
How are you doing?
We're meeting you again for the very first time.
It's good to see you.
You're impressed.
No.
No, there's no such thing as re-impressing.
There was a movie about a guy with short-term memory.
I don't know if he saw it.
Momentum.
What a great film.
I love that film.
That was a powerful film.
I don't think that movie was about what it seemed to be about.
I think that movie was about politics.
I think it was about war.
It was about the short-term memory of a population under a democratic society.
Let's go there.
I thought of a lot about that film, why it was so powerful.
First of all, brilliantly constructed.
This is not giving anything away.
It goes backwards in time.
You know that right up front.
We won't give away the big winding, but it goes backwards in time, and so the scenes make sense later.
They're all well done and interesting, but they make sense later.
I think it is about when you don't have a history, you're much more prone to being manipulated into violence.
When you don't know your history, when you don't know where you're coming from, I think it's about that, too.
That is really interesting.
When you don't have really a past, then you can be used by others.
You can be propagandized.
You can be told, that's your enemy, because this guy, again, this you're told.
That's your enemy.
That's the bad guy.
Go get him.
And because he's got no memory, he's like, oh, okay, that's the bad guy.
Yeah, and that is the democratic, and that's the population of democracy, which is wars.
And that comes, I mean, it's the 1984 thing, right?
Now we've always been at war with East Asia and we've got no memory of the past.
Well, you know, it's weird to live under the current situation where, well, you know, we've been hearing all this stuff about Iran.
I swear that it was, what, 15 years ago?
It's like one letter different.
You just swap out one letter and it's exactly the same stuff.
I mean, you just can't believe it.
It's like, hey, everybody.
Oh, I had a question for you.
So I was talking about this with someone.
I think it's really interesting.
The study just came out recently.
It seems to be pretty credible that Mainstream Americans' faith in the mainstream media as accurate and honest sources of information down around a little below 20%.
Mainstream, like ABC News, like CNN, Fox, and all that.
Around 20%, a little below, 20%.
What do you think have been the major blows?
Because it was much higher than that, even as late as the 90s.
Much, much higher, many times higher than that.
What do you think the major blows have been?
Because you don't hear about it, obviously, in the mainstream media.
Well, I don't, you know, I have this new book coming out called No More Gatekeepers.
And I was writing the introduction the other day, and I told the story about when I first encountered Google News and its customization.
I fell in love with Google News immediately.
When I found out I could customize the news I got, then it was a weird thing, because over the next several weeks, I realized that I was amazed that all my favorite things were being reported so prominently in the news, and I remembered I had customized it.
And then I realized, well, that's a very interesting world in which we're living, that you only extract information That really is truly useful to you in your life.
Now that breaks down fundamentally.
That whole idea that we as a nation are interested only, you know, that there's such a thing as national news that we as a collective people must be fed in order to make us good citizens or, you know, whatever the thing is.
That is entirely shocking.
Well, and also we tend to be most interested in the news that we have some knowledge about.
I think it's right.
And then, of course, if you have knowledge about a topic and you read the mainstream media portrayal of things, you realize just how shallow and uninformed it really is.
You know, that's really true.
Even the best newspapers, even the New York Times, I mean, that's a good paper.
We hold our nose, but they write well.
No, it's a good paper.
If you know something really a lot about a topic, you read with the reporting, you can catch them in a little bending of things that aren't quite accurate every few sentences.
It's really true.
But, you know, people are interested in things that affect them personally.
I'm very interested.
And the music of the 7th and 8th centuries.
And so I'm really interested in any news that affects music of the 7th and 8th centuries.
And I'm being serious.
I mean, I really care about this topic.
That is some pretty specialized news, my friend.
But it turns out, if you're trolling the global worldwide web, there's like every few days there's a big news item about music from the 7th and 8th century.
And I never want to miss it.
That's fascinating.
That's cool.
I'm trying to think if I have a more obscure, and I really don't think that I have a more obscure field of interest that I work with, so I think you win that.
But, you know, other people are interested in collecting cars.
I mean, look, every person is different, and why shouldn't the news be different for every person?
So there's a breakup of a monopoly.
I think you could make a case that...
I don't think people believed a lot of news in the 1940s because it was war propaganda.
I'm not saying they opposed it, but they knew it was right.
I think that's right.
I think in the 50s, not that important.
I think in the late 60s when the mainstream media began to turn against the Vietnam War and then you follow that with Watergate in the early 70s.
74, I think.
That was a big high credibility.
That was a big high credibility.
You're saying it's because they were attacking power.
Well, yeah, because they were attacking power.
I mean, of course it was a liberal attack on a conservative blah blah blah, right?
But there was, I think, A high point of credibility for the media when they opposed the...
Standing up to power.
When the left wing was doing what the left wing should do, which is not support unions and support welfare, but oppose imperialism and oppose the imperial presidency, when they actually had a mandate.
So we get the Republicans to stop supporting foreign wars and attack welfare, and we get the left wing to stop attacking welfare and get them to attack the foreign wars.
So I think there was a high point in the 70s where there was quite a bit of, you know, the lone reporter, the Bourbon guy who wanted to just, you know...
Go to jail rather than reveal sources.
Yeah, and they, you know, they were so interested in the truth they didn't bathe or shave, that kind of stuff, right?
Like the hard-bitten detective stuff in the 1940s, right?
Yeah.
And then, it seemed to get...
I think that, certainly for the right, under Reagan, the media lost a lot of credibility.
Oh, I think so, because, I mean, it was pathetic.
But so relentlessly, they're talking about his hair dye causing problems with his brains and...
Yeah, all economic policy that Reagan used to describe was trickle down, you know, as if...
Two words would sum up the whole case.
And as if anybody even knows what the hell trickle-down means in any technical sense.
It was just pathetic.
And then, oh, decade of grief.
Yeah, cliche, cliche.
But I think, I think, and this was certainly the case for me, I remember incredibly, I was on a business trip when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.
I was on a business trip, I was driving with a sales guy, we were going on our way to do a presentation at some corporation, and I was listening to the radio.
In my mind, like, I still remember the shock.
I couldn't believe that the president was doing this kind of stuff.
Like, I couldn't believe, you know, the cigars and the...
I mean, I just...
I couldn't process it.
Even now, I'm stumbling over processing it.
And I thought...
I thought...
Well, that's it for him.
Like, if Nixon, with a couple of tapes and burglaries, if these guys got 20 years with no prior convictions for stuff that...
That LBJ did and Kennedy did.
I mean, Nixon didn't even install the scoop of tape machines, right?
So Nixon, yeah, was pretty unsavory.
But this, I thought, man, they're just going to hammer him back.
And it never came.
The hammer blow didn't come.
I thought feminists, oh my god, feminists, are going to just...
Boom!
You know, because I heard, oh, is there any greater disparity of power than a 21-year-old intern and the president, like the leader of the free world, right?
And I thought, he's using them like a Kleenex, you know, they're just going to hammer him.
And the blow never fell.
And I remember thinking, I couldn't, I was not particularly into, I was a business guy at the time, but I couldn't process that.
And I think a lot of people had trouble with that.
That very well could be.
I think that that was like, whoa!
And I think a lot of the accusations of liberal bias and so on that came out in the mid-2000s maybe had some roots in that where people became more interested in that.
Well, and probably after 9-11 there was this kind of a brief appreciation for everything official.
I think people gave the media a free pass after 9-11 because there was a sense of a need to, let's not look under the rug, let's support our institutions.
And I think that people felt, rightly or wrongly, I would say wrongly, but they felt that there was some justification for The Afghani War, although of course there wasn't, but that was believable, right?
They believed it.
It was supported by like 90% or so.
But in the lead up to the Iraq War, of course, I mean, once people found out the truth behind all of that.
Because the media is incredibly scaremongering, you know, like there's A.L.R.N. apples, there's razor blades in your candy at Halloween, there's B.P.A. will kill your kids and all this.
So they're incredibly concerned about danger to human health.
Except war.
You know, because when it comes to danger to human health, I mean war, why would you even talk about that?
And I think that also since then, even people who are pro-war have to at least admit that It is a pretty sanitized war.
Compared to Vietnam where they actually have people broadcasting their blood and guts.
This is incredible.
You never see any bodies.
I mean, you see little pictures of guys in the paper.
When they're in this, their first photo.
Yeah, their first happy photo.
You don't see and you can't even photograph the coffins.
And the media is really going along with that.
And you certainly are not having any kind of critical media.
Do you remember the picture of the poor girl with the napalm?
Yeah.
That was a victim of American people.
That was all over the US media.
You've not seen one body.
That's right.
One Iraqi body in the mainstream media.
You go on the web.
You have to.
I do this sometimes for my shows.
For images, I mean, you see the most awful stuff.
You can't see it anywhere.
They're not famous at all.
And in fact, we're not even urged in any sense to have any concern.
You can't even get numbers.
Yeah.
No, you can't get numbers.
The numbers are dead.
But it's true.
I mean, who cares about Afghanis?
Who cares about Iraqis?
Who cares about any of these people?
The only concern is Americans dying.
There's not even that much concern about that.
No.
No, it's pretty sanitizing.
And so it's been a non-war, of course, because there's been no debt.
That people can see.
The war comes out in oblique ways like housing crashes and inflation and reduced middle class income and so on.
But it's all very oblique and so on.
But there's no blood, no guts, no bodies.
You don't even see debris.
Like, I haven't seen a big bombed-out picture of a bombed-out street in the US media.
No, I think probably most Americans don't even know, really.
You know, it was interesting to me.
After 9-11 happened, my first advice was to think, now people will understand what's wrong with imperialism.
What are the consequences of evading the world like we've done and there will be a rising consciousness Let's go back to true American foreign policy.
Well, that was ridiculous.
I mean, within a matter of one day, I realized that was the stupidest political president ever.
Well, Harry Brown took a stab at that.
Yeah, he did.
But most people just thought, you know, Americans really don't understand what America, what this government is doing to the world.
Most people think America is all about baseball.
Backyard barbecues, great Sunday brunches with the family, and everybody's minding their own business.
Because most Americans mind their own business, they assume that their government must be doing the same.
Well, the view from inside empire is a delusion, right?
I mean, it's like being in a mall.
I guess it's always been that way, isn't it?
Oh, yeah.
Of course.
I mean, you've got your own concerns.
But there's another reason, I think, why the media is changing, is that You can immediately get access to foreign perspectives in a way that was impossible before.
I see what you mean.
Right.
So before, if you wanted to get, say, the Muslim view of American imperialism, you had to wait and maybe you couldn't even read the language until the three weeks showed up in some library or whatever.
Now, you know, Al Jazeera broadcasts in English, you can get the foreign perspective.
And it's true even if you look at the British perspective of the American financial crisis.
Much better.
It's paying on.
Yeah, much better.
So it doesn't even have to be some crazy foreign culture.
I mean, it can be English.
Who can believe what's happening these days?
One of my favorite shows to go on and be interviewed on and to watch is called Capital Account, which is a show run by Russia Today.
Do you know about the show?
I don't know the show.
I know Russia Today.
Russia Today, and it's funded by the Russian government, but the people who are working for there are mostly just like regular American people who are from the independent street, and they're not reporting the Russian view of things.
Actually, Russia Today just wants to make, the Russian government just wants to make money, and that's why they're funding it.
It's a great show called Capital Account.
It's got a great host, great researchers and everything.
And they have on people like me and many other people.
And it's got a gigantic audience.
I mean, huge.
I think that Russia Today was when Hillary Clinton blasted the problem that we don't have any more gatekeepers.
I think that that was probably what she had about.
She was upset about just the sheer popularity of Russia and other places like it.
So that's really cool too.
This was unimaginable.
Right, right.
I think another thing that happened with the media, too, was its astounding lack of prescience about any problems in the world.
Right?
I mean, you could go through the list.
It's almost endless, right?
I mean, they obviously had no reporting on Islamic terrorism.
I mean, even though there was...
I mean, they would report particular incidents, but there was never any pattern.
They had no prediction of any kind of financial crash.
They didn't predict the bubble in housing or the tech bubble or the problems in the financial industry and so on.
They didn't predict any of that stuff.
The list really goes on and on.
They didn't predict the Europe crisis.
And who did predict it?
It was all the alternative media media.
Yeah, and the Austrian economists and all that, and Peter Schiff and so on.
And they didn't predict the Arab Spring.
They didn't, right?
So I think people are saying, well, okay, what the heck are you people good for?
If you don't tell me anything that's coming, I can't trust anything you're saying right now, and there are other people who have a much better track record of telling me things that are actually useful and helpful.
The other thing that's good, one good trend I'm seeing in the media today, and people do cry all the time, is that the problem is mainstream media is no longer serious.
They get only pretty faces saying stupid things, reporting trivial stuff.
Well, in a way, that's good, because in being what we're talking about, the news has always been a form of entertainment.
It's just that in the past it was disguised with a kind of serious...
It was like a drama.
Yeah, yeah, right.
But now it's getting imperfectly silly, and that's work.
In a way, it's good, because there really isn't such a thing that you all took on the fight and all this stuff.
This is all a myth.
I mean, there were no godlike figures reporting to us what we needed to know.
Right, right, right.
And this whole act is all staged, you know?
So I'm glad to see that whole system just I mean, I tell stories about what the world was like when I was young and people can't believe it.
You had to go into a bank?
I don't understand.
Is there an inside to a bank?
I didn't even know.
The fact that we had three channels, you know.
Anyway.
And you had to go brrrrk.
Yeah, brrrrk.
Oh, there's Walter Crowder.
No, the whole world's been reinvented.
It's been customized according to the way individuals want to use it.
Well, that's like your argument about the Keurig coffee maker.
You know, it's more expensive, but you get your absolute, my coffee likes it, my wife likes it mild, and I like it strong, and we each get our own coffee.
Yeah, yeah.
It's the most irrational thing in the world.
I love it.
I love it.
I really feel like I'm slumming it when I pour a carafe now.
I feel like I'm in the third world.
I expect mud and worms to come out.
It's that primitive now, you know?
No, I mean, the market is always surprising.
If you had said, in the early days, I will come up with a machine that's quite an expensive machine.
It'll make a cup of coffee that's probably not as good as the average drip cup, and it'll cost five times more, and it'll sweep the country.
I was like, no, that's never gonna happen.
And it did happen.
It did happen.
So, listen, let's make sure that we get, so that people, they don't have to, to come see our thing tomorrow, they don't have to, they have to buy their way in?
You know, I'm not sure.
I think the thing to do is to go up to the registration counter and maybe bribe somebody.
And then take care of the rest.
A current coffee maker will do the job, I think.
I don't know how people get in, but, because I don't think you have to pay for the program.
Right.
Okay, so people can come by.
Laissez-faire books, do you have any sales on while four people are here?
We have good deals on everything.
The books are great prices.
They're much lower than retail and there's a whole variety of books.
I'm very pleased about our collection.
I didn't choose what we brought.
Do you mind if we take the camera and give a pan around?
Yeah, sure.
Let's show people the kind of books that we have here.
Would you mind?
Can you just bring the camera or I'll hold it.
We want to pan around the books to see what's available here.
Okay.
Let's bring it up and we'll just actually sweep around.
Let's do the panorama.
Hey, what's that bourbon for breakfast?
Because that looks pretty good.
Yeah, so you've got stuff right here.
Well mentioned, right?
Mises, human action, right?
The new-- Your arm is now immortalized.
Oh, and the customer.
Don't sound surprised.
That's not good much.
What is a customer doing here?
Tackle her quickly!
Look at this.
This is all the cool stuff in the world.
Sealed, so you know no one's grubby hands have been on them.
You can actually see what's inside.
Anyway, we'll figure that out later.
Neil Ferguson, great writer.
That's a gigantic one.
Are you intimidated by a book called Civilization?
No, not if I... No, I actually quite like it.
Oh, you're a bigger man than I am.
It seems like a little big...
This is absolutely essential reading.
Everyone has to read that.
P.J. O'Rourke, always a great, great author.
I saw him actually speak in Toronto quite some time back.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, he's really funny.
He's a good speaker.
No, he's good, and it's hard to be funny all the time.
He mostly is funny, but he's also serious.
Yeah.
Yeah, he is actually.
When comedians turn serious, it really hits you hard, right?
That's really great.
Yeah, that's right.
And the definitive edition, of course, of Road to Serfdom.
Road to Serfdom, that's right.
And we've got all of Skousen's books.
You know, one of the roles that Laissez-Faire plays at this conference is we are sort of the official book seller.
So a lot of the books we sell are the speakers' books.
Right.
But the speakers here are the best speakers and, you know, So we carry their books, so we end up with some of the best books too.
This is a new book.
This is funny.
I'm just going to highlight Conor Boyack's book.
He is a member of the Latter-day Saints.
He's a Mormon.
He thinks Mormonism and anarchism, or extremely limited government, are perfectly compatible.
It's a bestseller in the Mormon community.
You know, there's a niche for everything within the libertarian world.
You know what they say in marketing, if you've got a niche, scratch it.
Oh, sorry.
Hey, Steve Forbes' book is good.
Steve Forbes is good.
His new book?
Yeah.
It's good.
I haven't read it.
Yeah, it's good.
And the chapter on the Goldstein.
Listen, he was here a little bit ago.
Yeah, yeah.
And I said, so your chapter on the Goldstein was really good.
And it goes beyond Britain Woods.
You know what, though?
Can I tell you what an author hears?
All the rest of your chapters suck.
Yeah, right.
No, no, that's true.
You've got to be careful.
Very sensitive ego.
I asked him, I said, you used to be all in favor of Britain Woods.
Have you gone further?
He goes, oh, yeah.
I no longer think that Britain was alone as well.
We need a real gold standard.
And I suspected that when I read this book.
So, this is a nice book.
Oh, look.
We can't do this.
We can't keep doing this.
We did this already, but let's do it again.
Great book.
Ought of Being Free.
Here's some of our financial books.
Yes.
We've got a lot of these.
This guy, just this Get Rich With Dividends book just came out.
He's a nice guy.
Mark Lichtenfield.
He knows his stuff.
Can I make a visual joke?
Yeah.
Okay, I'm going to make a visual joke.
Go.
So, he's into double digit returns.
Do you know what my portfolio double digit has generally been?
These two digits.
This is what my portfolio has done to me.
These two digits.
So, get this book and you will get better digits from your portfolio than those.
Is that going to go on camera?
You couldn't do that on audio, and so this is why it's so great that we have video.
I couldn't do that.
Well, you have taste and glass and all kinds of good things.
Peter Schiff, it's the Schiff Central.
Peter Schiff is amazing.
This guy, what a machine.
Facts and figures like that.
I mean, he's not showing off.
It's just what he is.
It's there, yeah.
I believe that his bone marrow is composed entirely of members.
Yeah.
And he has got passion, too.
Yes, he is.
He's a great speaker.
Here's our new edition of...
Not just a law.
The law.
The law.
I mean, you read this, nothing's ever the same.
Nothing's ever the same.
Everything changes.
So, it's our new edition.
Oh!
Who wrote that?
One Jeffrey Tucker!
A man so confident he doesn't put any credentials by his name.
That book will whip you up into a frenzy of I don't know why.
This book helps you love Uncertainty.
Ah, I like that.
Just if you can get a look there.
Membership.
I just joined that myself.
Highly recommend it.
And when you join, you get this set of books and what are we up to?
20, 25 e-books now in the club.
More than you can consume.
Premium stuff.
Everything's perfect.
Put every bell and whistle on.
My books are coming tomorrow?
Yeah, they're coming tomorrow.
And they will be launched in a confetti cannon over the whole audience.
Yeah, right!
Mark Skelson was recommending this, The Importance of Living, by a Chinese philosopher.
I don't know anything about it.
You know, it's like a lifetime of readings.
I've just tried here.
This is like six months of reading, even if you were doing it full-time.
Yeah, it's really true.
So, anyway, we've got, of course, the staple, right?
Who couldn't live without it?
That's right.
When you want your liberty by the pound, this is the place to come.
Can I do my Napolitano joke?
Yeah.
Would you mind?
Yeah.
It is dangerous to be right when government is wrong.
King Kong called, he would like his hairline back.
And I say this in pure jealousy.
With pure jealousy.
No, it's like two centimeters down and then meeting his eyebrows.
He is an incredibly charismatic figure.
He really is.
I mean, just in person, some people have that star quality.
You kind of have it.
You kind of have that star quality.
Under the right lighting.
Yeah, okay.
But he's got it.
I mean, that kind of boom.
Oh, yeah.
He's very charismatic and a great speaker.
I didn't get a chance to see him today, but I'm hoping to see it online.
Let me just point out this book.
This guy, Christopher Mayer, he's like an Austrian economist.
He calls his book The World Right Side Up, and it's investing across six continents.
Why is that text not upside down?
Right, so he went all over the world and showed cool market things going on all over the place.
Basically demonstrating that the US is no longer the leader of the world economy anymore.
And that's a surprise to Americans.
I mean, so this news...
USA number one.
Yeah, and forever.
He shows it's no longer true, and he calls it the world right set up in the sense that the world's becoming a more normal place now.
Well, everybody talks about economic crisis as if the entire world is Europe and North America.
Yeah, you're right.
India, China, are you kidding me?
I mean, these people are invisible.
And what's neat is it's like boots on the ground kind of reporting.
So you find out about the water treatment plants in Mongolia and what's going on in the coal mines there, and then the Vietnamese catfish farms.
Oh, and if you really want to annoy leftists who talk about welfare state and helping the poor and so on, ask them how much free markets have reduced poverty across the world in the last 20 years.
Right, exactly.
50,000 people a month in India alone coming out of the poor into the middle class.
No, I mean, the market is liberating humanity.
The market has reduced world poverty from, like, it's like 50% to 20%, I mean, in 20 years.
And you can't find any leftist who's ever heard about this stuff.
The most powerful force for human liberation.
And that's why we love the market.
The market does more, I would say, even more than political activism.
I would say.
Alright, so let's just finish up down here.
Thanks so much.
We appreciate this.
Lies the government told you.
How do you know a politician is lying?
He has a pulse.
Lips don't even have to be moving, because you know he's thinking lies.
So I don't even count the lips moving things.
And I'm trying to figure out capitalism of freedom.
Every single person in the stock world tells me, oh, you have to read this gigantic...
Okay, after you finish Antinous Shrugged, okay.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, you can read Graham and Dodd.
But the good thing is they used 36-point font.
So there's actually only three pages in there.
How long do we go?
The Empire of Debt I think is really, really good too.
Is that Bonner?
Yeah, that's Bonner.
Nobody writes like Bonner.
He has an elegant hand.
Ed the Fed, a great book, I actually just read that recently.
And this is a very nice...
He's actually got a good analysis of brand I think as well too.
In here?
Or in here?
I think it was in here.
Okay.
A new edition of this?
I do not know this book at all.
Okay.
You love this book.
Yes.
You could write this book.
It came out in the war.
During the war.
During World War II. It's a warning about the rise of fascism in America.
At the same time, we're defeating it abroad.
John T. Fleck.
Great work.
And Leslie Fleck.
So I'm proud of that, of course.
You should be.
And Tiger, you know, on the go.
Oh, I'm Bob Murphy.
Bob Murphy will be speaking.
Lessons for the Young Economist.
Fantastic.
The first lesson is haggle for this book.
Do not pay face value at all.
At all.
Haggle like crazy.
That's a great book.
It's different from Economics in One Lesson, in the sense that it actually teaches the mechanics of economics, not just the principles, right?
Well, he's a real economist.
Yeah, yeah.
He was a great writer and a great thinker, but not a core.
And Bob is very much a technician and a great writer.
Yeah.
But I think he could read that and pass some of the exams, the college admissions exams for economics.
Right, right.
But it's also Austrian, so he kind of bridged the gap between the instruments.
It's an important book, underrated.
People don't talk about it enough.
Well, so that's it.
Do you want to do some quick pan around to Freedom Fest?
And we should note that the only reason we're able to do this interview now is during sessions, right?
Oh yeah, it's cramped here.
So when people get out of sessions, it's just madness.
Yeah, so if you get a chance to come down, highly recommend it.
This is a great, great bookstore and we'll be talking with some great people tomorrow.
We should say something nice about our amazing cameraman.
Yes, thank you so much.
Would you like to give your website so that people can come and see the work that you do online?
Sure.
I'm Alexander Meyer.
My website is thetrepanation.com.
It's a young, good-looking guy.
I looked exactly like that about four days ago.
But Vegas just drains the life right out of you.
It's like a vampire.
That's what it's supposed to do.
Well, thanks again so much.
We'll upload this, and we'll see everyone tomorrow.
Okay.
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