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Sept. 8, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:03:53

2477 College as an Excuse to Delay Living - Sunday Call In Show September 8th, 2013

Stefan Molyneux and special guest Jeffrey Tucker speak to listeners and discuss surviving law school, going to college as an excuse to delay living, classical literature, intellectual property, Aaron Schwartz and philosophy as medicine for the world.

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	Good morning, good morning, everybody.
	Stefan Mullen from Freedom Main Radio.
	It is the 8th of September, 2013, and we have as co-host, Bosom Buddy, the inimitable Jeffrey Tucker.
	We are going to call this perhaps the Jeff and Steph show or the Steph Tucker show, which is almost exactly like the Chris Tucker show, just a tad paler, probably, and with a few more 14th century madrigals than you'd expect in his show.
	So thanks so much, Jeff, for taking the time this morning.
	Jeff is the head honcho, chief Punjabi merchant at Lasse Fair Books at lfb.org.
	If you'd like to sign up at lfb.org forward slash Stefan, S-T-E-F-A-N, they have the most amazing book club where you get free audiobooks and articles just for a few bucks a month.
	Highly recommend it.
	So thanks, Jeff, for taking the time this morning.
	Sure, it's really fantastic to be here.
	I like this whole Sunday morning thing.
	I just got through conducting a big choir.
	We sang a bunch of medieval music, late Renaissance music, and I sort of hustled away.
	I saw Robert Murphy out there listening.
	That was interesting.
	So I'm plunging in here after that sort of heady experience, and it's a beautiful day.
	Well, I wish I could believe you, Jeff, but if you tell me that Bob Murphy was around public singing and didn't join in, I'm afraid that I must call your bluff.
	On that one, because I don't think I've ever seen that karaoke whore near a microphone or any kind of public singing without putting his lungs to good use.
	You know, it's interesting because I had to leave before speaking to him, but I'm looking forward to talking to him afterwards and trying to make sense of this myself.
	Fantastic.
	Well, so we chatted yesterday about the show and you had talked about how enjoyable it was to interact with Canadians customs officials It was a remarkable experience,
	Stefan, because I had come to expect this from the TSA, but the Canadian border, you know, I've always thought it was somehow a little more humanitarian and that sort of thing.
	But, you know, you do the wrong thing and, you know, you set off the wrong cues in some way and, you know, suddenly all over.
	It was a remarkable experience for me because I had gone up to the customs and just explained my travel plan, which was a little convoluted.
	You know, I had gone From San Diego and driven to Los Angeles and then flown out of Los Angeles to Seattle and so on.
	And I misstated something the first time and I backtracked.
	I said, okay, actually I went to San Diego first.
	And that was just that one little, I think that verbal slip on my part.
	Well, also if you accidentally throw the word Islamabad in, I think that they also get a little excited, but I'm sure that didn't.
	So that was the kind of, I think that may have been what did it.
	Later, the official told me that what set everything off was my claim to be coming into Canada as a tourist or as a visitor for just personal reasons and yet You know, I sort of seemed to be dressed in a sort of business way.
	And I had to demonstrate that actually I always dress this way by pulling out this gigantic wad of bow ties from my suitcase.
	But now, listen, what was interesting to me is that I thought I was on my way towards freedom, just turning in my custom form.
	And the guy very calmly said, just follow that letter B. Okay?
	So I said, well, okay, I'll follow the letter B. Long hallway.
	Suddenly I find myself embroiled in this While sitting in these chairs of a kind of a government bureaucracy and waiting, and the people in front of me seemed to have cobwebs on them.
	I said, I'm sorry, can I ask you how long you've been here?
	They said, oh, about 45 minutes.
	I thought, oh, no.
	Now, this is interesting because I sat there.
	Nobody's guarding me.
	Nobody's, you know, quote, forcing me to be there.
	Of course, if I had reversed my course and walked backwards out of the line and tried to go, I'm sure they would have arrested me in a second, right?
	But there wasn't anybody to say, hey, are you detaining me?
	Am I free to go?
	Like you see on these videos.
	There wasn't anybody to speak to at all.
	You know, you're just kind of stuck there with no information.
	And I sat there for a full hour until finally they...
	They called me forward.
	They wanted to know the number of the people I was visiting in Canada.
	And I said, gee, I just don't quite remember.
	I opened my...
	I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket.
	I unlocked it.
	I looked at the number.
	She said, oh, can I see the number, please?
	And I handed her the phone.
	Okay, I'm an idiot, right?
	She takes the phone and walks away with it and was gone 30 minutes.
	And during which time, you can imagine, right?
	My heart was beating, my hands were sweaty.
	I stood there, again, unguarded but trapped while she had my unlocked cell phone doing I don't know what in another room for 30 minutes.
	And eventually came back, gave it all back to me and said, you know, had a small talk with me and said, you're free to go.
	And I told her, I said, you know, this is kind of a scary experience for me.
	But the thing that alarmed me more than anything else was that you stole my cell phone and that you were gone for 30 minutes and it was unlocked.
	My whole life was in your hands for 30 minutes.
	She said, oh, we just do that as a precautionary measure for you so that you won't make phone calls and we won't distrust you.
	And I said, well, as much as I appreciate that, I did find it to be a complete invasion.
	So that's my story.
	Yeah, the ironic thing, of course, is that they are trying to make you less anxious in a situation of anxiety that they have created for you.
	Which is sort of like locking someone in the basement and then expecting him to thank you when you give him some food and water because you're concerned he might be hungry.
	That, to me, is tragic.
	Well, you know, there's a number of things, Stephan, that I did wrong in retrospect.
	I realized this.
	We all have to kind of train to encounter these situations.
	It's regrettable, right?
	But given that we're always, there's always the risk that we're going to be captured, really, at any time, all of us, that we need to kind of practice this a little bit more.
	And I talked to some people.
	They said, well, you know, First of all, don't unlock your cell phone in front of a government official.
	Just don't do it.
	Leave it buried in your bag somewhere.
	If you can't remember the number, just say, I'm sorry, I don't have the number.
	You know, like that.
	But somebody I spoke to afterwards, I thought was very good advice.
	I said, anytime you're in that sort of interrogation situation, whether it's the TSA or the Canadian passport customs officials, whatever, you need to treat it like a deposition.
	And a deposition, there's a kind of a practiced technique for doing this.
	You have to learn to say only what's necessary, but say it in a way that sounds forthcoming.
	And you should never be afraid To stop the series of questioning, and you should never answer anything that leads to another question.
	So, for example, when they say, well, who are you visiting?
	You just say, you know, Joe and Jane.
	And they say, well, are they citizens?
	You can just say, you know, I don't really know.
	Actually, I've never asked them.
	Well, what is their profession?
	Well, I don't know.
	That's just something that's their business, not really mine, and so on.
	You know, so you need to kind of be forthcoming but not give information.
	It's a kind of a practice technique, I think.
	So I wasn't very well practiced at this technique, and I gave too much information that led to more questions, led to more questions.
	Eventually, they tripped me up, and then, you know, then the cage slammed shut, essentially.
	So I was I was, you know, essentially under arrest, really, for an hour and a half.
	Yeah, I mean, I've read some of these things where they say, you know, just continually ask, am I free to go?
	Am I being detained?
	And so on.
	And what I find interesting about that is the idea that because they are bound by particular rules, then those rules, you know, they have to follow them and so on.
	And of course, in my opinion, Experience and understanding, though, the police, they don't have to follow any rules in particular.
	They can do whatever they want.
	I mean, this fantasy that there's this magic spell called the rules that is going to protect you just seems to me not valid.
	So, I mean, I've been going back and forth across the border, of course, for business and for FDR. For 20 plus years.
	And yeah, I mean, you answer the questions honestly, openly, maintain eye contact, be friendly, and resist the urge to babble.
	I mean, that's certainly been my experience.
	And just, you know, as short a possible reply as you can provide while, you know, maintaining eye contact and being friendly.
	I think that's always been the best approach for me.
	Well, you're right.
	And what's nice about what you just said is that it implies that you prepared well for it.
	Whereas when I got out of that plane, I was just bouncing around happy as can be, feeling a little bit mischievous and a little bit eccentric.
	I was doing this sort of banter with the passport office, which I tend to do because I tend to look at these people as just human beings.
	But this was, I think, I think this was my mistake, right?
	Because then I, you know, I misspoke a little bit.
	I was a little bit, how would you say, you know, just a little bit too superficial, you know?
	And kind of trying to cheer people up, which I do.
	Actually, when I see a sad bureaucrat, my impulse is to want to make them smile, you know?
	But, you know, that was my mistake.
	Because I made a couple of misstatements.
	They looked at me.
	They thought, this guy's dressed like a loon.
	Why don't we just snag him and pump him for information and find out what he's really about?
	And it could have been very...
	Yeah, I think it's sort of like Siegfried and Roy with the Lions in Vegas, you know?
	I mean...
	For the most part the lions are going to be fairly cooperative but you know you do have to remember that they are dangerous predators as well and treat them with the proper respect and respect I mean just in terms of caution not in terms of like looking up to them morally but yeah they're in the matrix they genuinely believe that they are protecting the homeland from dangerous people I'm quite positive they have quotas so if they get a bunch of nice people in a row it doesn't mean that you're not going to be snagged for something And I think the important thing is to be friendly and cooperative.
	This idea that you sort of just, you know, block them at every move and refuse to give up any information, I think that's just going to lead you into a whole world of trouble.
	And I think the important thing, of course, is to just live a life where you don't have that much particular to hide from the government and just be honest and forthright.
	I think if you put that wall up, I think, you know, they're going to escalate.
	And the problem is, of course, as government officials, they have an infinitely greater capacity to escalate than you have to resist.
	Yeah, I think that's really true.
	I had my own sort of form of private resistance.
	While I was waiting to be called back, I just watched an episode of Breaking Bad, which is a fun little irony that I enjoyed.
	Because they didn't know that.
	But I think that's right.
	You can't actually confront them because it's just going to create more trouble for you.
	And another point to remember, and every person who imagines themselves to be free right now needs to remember this, you're just one mishap away from being captured and being ruined and being wrecked.
	Potentially ruining every aspect of your supposed free existence.
	And everybody is in this position.
	It could happen to anybody.
	This is the situation we're all in.
	I mean, we're all deeply vulnerable.
	We need to practice.
	We need to prepare.
	And just be aware of it.
	Work for freedom.
	And both in a public and a private way.
	But just remember that we're Whatever freedom you think you have right now, vis-a-vis the state, is essentially conditional and largely elusive, actually.
	Yes, and certainly if it does seem to be coming a difficult, dangerous, or escalating situation, I think clamming up and getting a lawyer is the best thing to do.
	Because, of course, there is lots of capacity for self-incrimination.
	Because we don't know what the laws are that we could or could not break.
	There's that book out that says we all do three felonies a day.
	And so, yeah, I think be friendly and positive.
	If you just happen to get into the maw of some, you know, uniformed sadist, then, yeah, then friendliness is going to be perceived as weakness.
	And then I think it's time to clam up and ask for a lawyer.
	But I think, you know, for the most part, they're not cruel people.
	They're not mean people.
	They are people who believe that they're providing a genuinely positive public service.
	They're keeping terrorists out.
	They're keeping drug dealers out.
	They're keeping illegal immigrants out.
	They're protecting the homeland.
	And I think that's just an important thing to remember.
	It's a long way from our perspective, but that's one of the great challenges of empathizing with people who are a long way away from your perspective, that they do think they're doing the right thing, and they have no exposure or experience with any kind of true liberty philosophy.
	And so they simply won't come over, and there's just no possibility that they're going to sort of understand where it is that you're coming from and so on.
	So, yeah, I think recognize that they are, you know, for the most part, pretty nice people who have, you know, imbibed a huge amount of propaganda and are trying to do the right thing according to the principles that they hold and recognize that accordingly and that this is not a place for political debate.
	Right.
	And, you know, the other thing is they might not even believe in the system, actually, that they're a part of, but they believe that they're a part of that system, right?
	So they have to sort of function in that capacity.
	Even if they think it's a ridiculous bureaucracy and they're embarrassed to be working there, they are socialized by that work that they're doing if they've been there any length of time.
	One of the things that fascinated me, and we've all experienced this, is that you go from being initially under suspicion and then treated as if you're probably a grave danger and you're the enemy.
	And then once You're sort of absolved from this.
	You somehow pass the test, which I had no idea whether I was going to pass or not.
	I don't even know what that means to pass.
	Then suddenly you're one of the good guys.
	So she comes back with my cell phone and it's like, well, Mr.
	Tucker, sorry for the inconvenience.
	Everything's great.
	Take off.
	And that's when I kind of pressed her about why this happened in the first place.
	That sort of thing.
	But it's very alarming.
	Do you have the same person on both sides?
	I'm still me.
	She's still who she is.
	For an hour and a half, essentially, I am I'm threatened, essentially, with being captured in jail.
	I don't know what are they going to find on my cell phone that they're going to object to.
	How many little small white lies did I tell in the course of my interrogation?
	And what is the consequence of that?
	How much did I fudge?
	You know, a date, a purpose, all these sorts of things.
	It's really none of their business.
	So, you know, we're inclined to not be entirely forthcoming.
	And quite frankly, I wasn't, actually, just to be full disclosure here.
	But what is the consequence of that?
	You know, I wasn't actually sure.
	I mean, is it really a penalty of perjury?
	Oh, yeah.
	If you lie, you turn what could be just an innocuous but scary experience into a full-on wreck-your-life kind of situation.
	So definitely do not lie to government officials.
	They're allowed to lie to you, of course.
	They're allowed to lie in interrogation.
	They're allowed to mislead you.
	They're allowed to openly falsify what it is that they're talking about.
	But if you lie to a government official and they find out, Then it doesn't matter if you're Santa Claus on his way to deliver presents, you're in a whole world of trouble.
	So I think that's a really important thing to remember.
	It's a little bit strange, isn't it?
	What kind of lies do you mean?
	If you have a piece of beef jerky in your sock and they ask you, do you have any meat products?
	And you say no.
	Would that constitute a lie?
	Absolutely.
	And if they catch you lying to them, then they're going to assume that everything that you say is false.
	And they're going to need to verify absolutely everything.
	And of course, to lie to a government official is a crime.
	You know, somebody told me, they said, well, there's no way that during the period in which they had your unlocked cell phone that they could legally go through your cell phone and look at every Facebook message you've ever sent, every email.
	You know, they had access to everything, right?
	My entire web history.
	They have access to my entire Google profile.
	I mean, with an unlocked cell phone, you have everything you would ever want to know about me.
	And this person said, there's no way that they did that.
	Because that's just illegal.
	They can't.
	They can't do that.
	I think that that's actually incorrect.
	And the reason I say that is that the person next to me who was visiting from Japan, he apparently had a family member in Canada, as best I could tell.
	And he had misled them about the existence of this fellow and where he lives.
	And they held him under intense questioning the entire time I was there.
	But at some point, they got his computer or cell phone or something and was interrogating him, confronting him with the fact that he had apparently communicated through email with this person who lives in Canada who's like a cousin or a brother or something like that.
	And that he had told them that this was not the case.
	They presented the evidence that it, in fact, was the case.
	And yes, they were confronting him, so therefore you lied to us.
	Why did you lie to us?
	And so on.
	So I know they can do this, right?
	I saw this actually happening.
	There's no need for a warrant or anything.
	They can do anything.
	Is that your understanding, too?
	They can do anything that they want to.
	Yeah, and look, let's say that what they do is not legal.
	Let's just say that.
	Well, so what?
	I mean, what that means is basically you're then embroiled in a legal fight that is likely to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and go on for years.
	I mean, who wants that?
	And the best that you can hope for is to be restored to where you were before you lied, but minus $100,000 in years of stress.
	So no, I mean, I think just always tell the truth.
	There's no magic rule that says they can or can't do anything.
	I mean, you've probably seen these cop shows where the cops want to go into someone's apartment and they don't have a warrant.
	And what do they do?
	They say, hey, did you hear that?
	I thought I heard someone crying out for help.
	And then they just kick the door in.
	Because they're allowed to enter without a warrant if they believe that somebody's in danger.
	And then they can say, well, I guess it must have been a TV next door.
	Maybe it was somebody outside or I don't know.
	But, you know, we all heard somebody crying for help.
	So we went in.
	So the rules, they're just, I mean, don't rely on the rules to protect you.
	Just rely on honesty and friendliness and empathy with the people that you're dealing with and go on your way.
	And don't carry an unlocked cell phone, you know, and put it in front of the bureaucrat saying, yeah, here's the number.
	That was the dumbest thing I've ever done, actually, in retrospect.
	Well, I mean, dumb, you know, after the fact, it's easy, right?
	In the moment, it's, you know, remember as well, of course, I mean, they are, you know, very experienced and well-trained at what they do, and this is your first situation in that situation.
	So, you know, I don't jump into the ring with Mike Tyson in his prime and say, well, I played a little bit of Xbox boxing, so I'm sure I'm good to go.
	Respect experience.
	Respect training.
	And also, you're under stress, and they're not.
	So you can't compete with them.
	I think it's really important for us all to have respect for experience and training and so on.
	And you can't just jump into that situation and win.
	It doesn't matter how smart you are.
	The fact is that you're not trained.
	You're under stress.
	They're experienced.
	They're not under stress.
	They're going to win.
	I mean, this is why everybody needs a lawyer.
	I mean, if you're ever interrogated by the police, heaven forfend.
	But...
	You know, they know what they're doing and you don't.
	And they have nothing at stake, really, in particular, but you have everything at stake.
	And so, this is why you need professionals on your side in these kinds of situations.
	So, yeah, you can say, well, that was kind of dumb, or this and that and the other.
	But, you know, they're very practiced at being friendly and positive and saying, oh, can I just see that cell phone for a moment?
	And if you say no, what happens?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Just pass on the cell phone.
	Be friendly and positive.
	And remember, it worked.
	You know, so you can say it was a dumb thing to do, but you got out and it worked fine.
	Well, that's true.
	The other thing that occurred to me is that whatever you think you're doing that's clever, they've seen a thousand times already.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	They know.
	You're like an amateur trying to play chess against Deep Blue.
	I mean, he's going 12,000 moves ahead or whatever, right?
	Yeah, exactly, right.
	So this, even my initial step of misstating my travel route, you know, was, you know, set off this sort of series of events.
	And, you know, it's funny, it's always the case that when you tell these stories, you know, there's some listener out there going, oh, a big deal, Tucker, you know, this maudlin.
	Whining, you were inconvenienced by 90 minutes in exchange for which we get massive security or whatever.
	But during the course of that 90 minutes, it's the scariest sort of 90 minutes you'll ever experience if you've never been in it.
	Because you don't really know what's going to happen to you.
	And you realize that anything could happen to you.
	And there's essentially nothing you could do about it.
	Yeah.
	So it's not a normal just 90 minutes.
	If you knew the outcome in the middle of it, yeah, you would relax.
	You know, you do something else, play Sudoku or whatever, and just goof off and have fun and just wait it out.
	But you don't really know in the course of it.
	You don't really know what the outcome is going to be.
	And you suddenly become aware that it could be very dangerous for you.
	It could be the end.
	Yeah, no, it could be the giant crossroad in your life that goes from fun to hell.
	And of course now, I mean, it's not just that 90 minutes is not encapsulated.
	Now it moves forward into the next time you go across any border.
	You will remember that forever.
	And so, yeah, it has become sort of a permanent part of your life experience.
	And it's fine.
	Yeah, it's fine afterwards.
	But, you know, we as a species are designed to catastrophize.
	You know, catastrophizing is what keeps us alive, which is to imagine the worst conceivable outcomes to just about any situation.
	Because those who didn't catastrophize, who said, oh, I'm sure that's not a tiger in the grass, I'm sure that's just some grass blowing back and forth, you know, they ended up as tiger poop the next day.
	So we are designed as a species to catastrophize, to constantly dwell on the worst possible situations that could occur.
	That's what gets us out of the caves and into where we are now.
	And so in those kinds of situations, you can't stop that tsunami of catastrophization.
	To want to do that or to imagine you could rise above it, to want to be some kind of different species or maybe even a non-life form.
	So that happens and you can't help but dwell on it again.
	Like a near-miss with a tiger, you don't want to do that again.
	So you'll obsess about it afterwards.
	I mean, it's called PTSD, but it actually is a kind of survival mechanism.
	And I'm sure you've been thinking about it quite a bit afterwards, and it has become a part of your alarm system now.
	So I can totally understand that it's a big deal.
	What do you think about the phrase, resist arrest?
	I've thought about this...
	I mean, it's like the worst thing you can do, right?
	And it's not strategic.
	It's not a good idea.
	But isn't that sort of an embedded impulse in the nature of the human person to do what you can to avoid being captured?
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, whether it's a predator, a non-human predator or a predator, if something grabs you, then your impulse is to fight and resist and get away.
	Of course, right?
	I mean, in the tribal societies where we sort of evolved, there was not – it wouldn't be somebody local who would do that except in fun.
	It would be an enemy tribesman.
	Some foreigner.
	And so to harm them and get away would be your impulse.
	And that would be the safest thing you could do.
	And, of course, it would indicate that you were probably separated from your tribe, which, you know, we wouldn't be used to.
	So it's a perfectly natural impulse.
	But it is, of course, you know, these words that they use, resisting arrest.
	Well, you know, it's like climate change denier.
	It's just, well, there is this fact.
	You're going to be arrested and you're resisting it, and that's bad.
	And so it places the entire onus of the use of force or the creation of problems on the person resisting the initiation of force.
	It's a blame the victim kind of thing, which is, you know, tragically common.
	You know, just working on this documentary that basically makes the case that we're ruled not by the state but by language.
	And if we can get through to clear language, then we can get through to moral clarity and to change in the world.
	But as long as we're lost in the language of the state, we'll never be free of the laws of the state because that's all they fundamentally are.
	Well, that's interesting.
	You know, I've thought about this sometimes.
	So the idea is that if it's a government official who is giving you an order, then you essentially have to kind of do a metaphysical sort of gutting of your heart and soul completely and surrender it all to them, or else you will be destroyed.
	That's the claim.
	And this happens whether it's a parking ticket, you know, or a border crossing, or essentially any encounter with the government.
	When they give an order, then you must surrender everything about your humanity on the spot.
	That's a pretty gigantic claim that the state has over us, actually.
	And as you say, the rule of law is useless under those conditions.
	And those conditions are pervasive all the time.
	Any time you're given an order, you can never resist them.
	Every other area of life, you have an opportunity to kind of object or negotiate or find some compromise solution or maybe pay a small fine for failing to comply with something.
	But when you're dealing with the state, everything's at stake.
	You must demonstrate a complete absence of self-ownership and demonstrate to them that they are 100% in control of every aspect of your life when they say they are, or else the results will be catastrophic for you.
	Yeah, I mean, and the interesting thing is the people who say that the laws of the state may protect you.
	Well, of course, Bradley Manning was compelled by the law to make public or at least to report war crimes that he saw.
	And so he did.
	And although Obama committed to protect whistleblowers, although what the military was up to that Bradley Manning revealed was illegal, he goes to jail.
	And nobody else does.
	The people who are performing the war crimes don't go to jail.
	The person who is explicitly told he must report these crimes and he will be protected is the only one who goes to jail.
	And it's the same thing with Snowden, right?
	I mean, Snowden revealed illegal Activity on the part of the NSA that they repeatedly lied to Congress about when questioned.
	And who's the only one on the run?
	Who's the only one in hiding?
	The people who broke the law?
	The people who lied to Congress?
	Well, no.
	It's illegal for you and I to lie to a border guard, but it's completely legal for the head of the CIA or the NSA or whoever to lie to Congress.
	And then the only people who reveal that.
	So people who say that the rules are there to protect, you just got to ask these people who are actual whistleblowers and who are revealing International war crimes, the worst conceivable thing that human beings can do in the eyes of any kind of justice.
	And they don't get punished, but the person who reveals the crime gets punished despite acting in full accordance with the laws compelling him to do so.
	So, anyway, this is just something to...
	To remember you are not in a situation of rules, and appealing to the rules, it's, you know, I mean, you can say when playing Monopoly with a pigeon that the pigeon is breaking the rules, but the pigeon don't care, baby.
	You know what, it does raise fundamental questions about this whole claim that you can restrain the state through the rule of law.
	I'm not against the attempt, but it's not worked out very well.
	Because the problem is the institution itself, not so much the laws under which it operates.
	The laws can be terrible, can be worse or better, probably.
	But in the end, you know, all states are by their nature totalitarian.
	And egregiously wicked all states and all times and all places because they operate under a different set of rules from the rest of the population.
	They're essentially lawless relative to the laws that you and I have to obey.
	Well, I think lawless may be a kind way of putting it.
	You know, we all hope, I hope to live in a lawless society, so to speak, in that it's not a centrally imposed initiation of force that is defined as the law.
	But they're anti-law, in that that which empowers the government is specifically illegal for everyone else, right?
	As we all know, you and I can't initiate the use of force.
	The government is founded on the initiation of force.
	You and I can't counterfeit or declare war or We can't incarcerate people at will.
	We can't pass rules that everyone in the neighborhood has to obey or will shoot them.
	So the government is actually anti-law.
	And people have this weird thing like the government is some sort of cow and the rules are these electric fences.
	You know, Harry Brown used to say, you know, that they wanted to bind down the government in the chains of the Constitution, which I think comes from some sort of 18th century.
	That's the kind of rhetoric you would expect from the 18th century.
	And, I mean, these are all wonderful images.
	They have nothing to do with what the state is.
	I mean, there are no chains.
	The government isn't something you can bind down.
	There's no fences that you can enclose the government around and have it stay in.
	Basically, what you're doing is you're disarming everyone and you're giving a small group of people all the weaponry in the known universe, crossing your fingers and hoping the power won't corrupt.
	I mean, this is a mad fantasy that's only believable because, you know, we're trained by the government to believe that it's somehow normal.
	And everyone gets, when they look at every other country, well, power corrupts.
	So, you know, well, boy, those Syrian guys are really bad or what Saddam Hussein is doing is really bad and so on.
	I'm not putting the Western leaders in the same moral category, but there's this belief that somehow power corrupts other people.
	And, you know, if somebody, you know, some guy wins a lottery, oh, that guy used to be a really nice guy.
	He turned into a real jerk once he got all this money or whatever.
	And we somehow imagine that money and fame and power and so on corrupts.
	Everyone we know, but there's this magic group of people that it somehow makes them better to have that which makes everyone else worse.
	And it's a funny kind of thing that we just have to keep combing over as a species, that it's just not true.
	Stefan, you'll be amazed to hear that.
	I wish I had mentioned this to you already.
	You can't imagine who I ran into at Libertopia.
	A certain man named Bernard von Nothouse.
	Now, this is a fellow.
	Who, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago or something like that, was one of the first to come up with the idea of competitive money with the state.
	And he invented a thing called the Liberty Dollar, which was just a silver dollar.
	Anyway...
	Arrested, accused of...
	I think his crime was...
	Well, it was competing with the dollar, essentially.
	And, you know, put in jail for several months or something like that.
	Anyway, he was convicted.
	He's awaiting sentencing.
	He's been awaiting sentencing for two and a half years.
	In the meantime, of course, he was a major influence behind Satoshi Nakamoto's invention of Bitcoin.
	So...
	It's a fascinating thing for me to be in the presence of this man who took this outrageous leap into the future and he's still out walking around in good spirits.
	Sort of really fun to meet a real living monument to progress and an important figure in history just right there at Libertopia.
	Fantastic.
	And a guy who's taken the kind of bullets that hopefully he will never have to take.
	Chatting, be most enjoyable, but we do have a couple of listeners on the line who wish to pepper us with questions.
	So, Mike, if you'd like to bring up the first listener.
	Sure, Josh, you're up first.
	Go ahead.
	Hi, can you guys hear me okay?
	Yep.
	Okay, cool.
	Just good morning.
	I just wanted to thank you both for everything you guys do.
	It's a pleasure.
	I just had a few questions.
	Go ahead.
	Now just ask the first one, because if we get the barrage of questions, we'll miss some for sure.
	So if we can just ask the first one, that'd be great.
	Sure.
	Well, the biggest thing is I'm a first-year law student.
	I just started in law school a couple weeks ago.
	And if you've touched on this before, I'm catching up on the podcast.
	Do you have any advice for maintaining integrity in a corrupt situation, such as law school?
	And is it selling out to compromise, to get along in order to get to the end?
	Or does it mean to have integrity by, you know, if you hear a professor or a student saying something, should you answer that even if you're not going to win the argument?
	Because it's wrong to say what they're saying.
	What is your goal in becoming a lawyer?
	Why are you pursuing that profession?
	I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm just curious why.
	Well, A, it seems to fit my aptitudes and my abilities, but also I originally wanted to become a lawyer to run for office before I became an anarchist when I was but also I originally wanted to become a lawyer to run for office I tried to change things that way, and I thought that was a path towards that.
	But after, I have two goals.
	I want to either be a defense attorney And just represent people on a case-by-case basis against, you know, bad prosecution.
	Or I want to look into actually alternative dispute resolution.
	Things like mediation and arbitration.
	That's like almost competitive with the state, the courts, because those are Obviously we know what those are, but looking into competing with that in a way.
	Right, okay.
	Well, I mean, I've talked about it before, but Jeff, what are your thoughts on how to survive law school and prosper morally with that kind of education?
	Well, I mean, it's true in economics graduate school.
	I know a little bit more about that, but you'll hear always a lot of nonsense in the classroom.
	If your goal is to learn economics, there are better ways to do it than going to graduate school.
	So what is the goal of graduate school?
	Essentially, as I understand it, the purpose is to get the ticket We get the license to practice in a profession you really care about.
	So you need to always think about getting from here to there.
	I don't believe you have the moral obligation to correct your professors, to tell your colleagues everything you're thinking at every moment.
	You see it as a purely instrumental goal.
	As I say, if you want to learn the law, there are better ways to do it than going to law school.
	The purpose of law school is to get the license to get out and practice and do some good for the world.
	That's not always easy to do because on one hand you know you've been exposed to sort of a fuller perspective and it can be extremely frustrating day to day.
	It's difficult to study and learn and embed yourself in a world that you don't really believe in.
	It takes a lot of strength of character and a lot of serious conviction and a lot of energy.
	It's something you have to just kind of watch yourself.
	If you find yourself slipping and getting confused, just take a deep breath and step back from it and just remember what always matters.
	We all live in a world That's very confusing.
	I mean, for all of us, all the time.
	Especially for people who believe in non-aggression and human liberty.
	That is not the world we live in.
	So navigating it can be very trying and very difficult.
	But the cause of human liberty has always faced terrible barriers and trying times going forward.
	I would just count this among them.
	You just have to dig really deep.
	That's your goal.
	You have to dig really deep within yourself morally and spiritually and otherwise and find the stuff that makes it possible.
	And then when you achieve that goal, do something spectacular for yourself and for humanity.
	Yeah, and of course the only people who will really respect a law degree are people that you probably don't want to do a whole lot of business with.
	You know, I mean...
	People, I think, respect and recognize competence without the degrees if you're among sort of liberty-minded people and so on.
	And so I think that's one thing that's important to remember.
	The other thing, I mean, inserting yourself deep into the belly of the beast and becoming a defense attorney, I'm sure that there's some people you'll be able to help through that process, although probably a lot less than you think.
	Because as far as I understand it, the job of the defense attorney is to convince his clients to plea bargain, right?
	Because as you know, like 90-95% of, I assume you're from the US, but I think it's similar throughout the world, at least the Western world, 90-95% of allegations against potential criminals...
	They don't go to court.
	They simply say, well, we'll give you 10 years unless you plead down to 18 months, and then you'll get off, you know, in 12 months with good behavior.
	And also, you know, we're going to give you 10 years, and if you go to trial and you lose, you'll probably get 15.
	So you're basically not...
	It has nothing to do with guilt or innocence.
	It has nothing to do with proving everything.
	There are so many crimes now, and in the U.S. in particular, such an incredibly high proportion of prisoners that the system simply could not function if the guilt or innocence of people had to be determined in any objective fashion.
	Trials are very expensive.
	They're long term.
	And so the system as a whole can't possibly determine the guilt or innocence of everyone.
	So all they do is threaten people with ridiculously egregious jail sentences and then have them plea down.
	So your job as a defense attorney is delivering people who you will probably believe to be innocent into prison.
	You will be handling people, you will be flowing them through, and you will be telling them that it is probably in their best interest to accept a plea bargain, regardless of their innocence or guilt.
	And you will be delivering people who you believe to be innocent, even if they're guilty of a crime like using drugs or something like that, or prostitution.
	You don't believe, I would assume, if you're a libertarian or an anarchist, you don't believe that that's a crime.
	That's a state-invented crime.
	And so you will be Every day you will be delivering a dozen people into the prison system that you believe are innocent.
	I can't imagine that is going to leave your soul untarnished.
	You may be helping them reduce higher crime sentences or longer crime sentences and so on, but you will be handing innocent people over to the tragic rape rooms of the American prison industrial complex.
	Boy, looking at doing that for 40 years, given your belief system and given that you'll be surrounded by people who believe the exact opposite of what you believe and you are, knowingly and willingly participating in a system that hands the innocent over to incarceration and, frankly, sexual torture for the most part.
	I've got to think that.
	I would be cautionary about that as a good and productive and happy way to spend your precious life.
	Really, really think about that is what you're going to be doing.
	I'd sure hate for you to work hard, hard, hard to get the degree, to get the job, to get in there, and to just find it was morally repulsive to hand people over in this system rather than tell them to fight for their innocence because you have to, of course, act at the best interest of your client.
	That's part of your professional dedication and I just don't think in the system a defense attorney is going to be getting people off.
	I think what they're going to be doing is handing people over to prisons who you in particular believe be innocent.
	So I would really caution you about that.
	I think that's right.
	I mean if you can, you know, there's some professions that you can't in any way or shape or form legally practice without a license.
	Can you come up with a great dispute resolution organization without being a lawyer?
	Well, sure.
	If you're appealing to the libertarian community, they're frankly not going to really care about whether or not you have professional credentials.
	They're going to care about the quality of the work that you produce and how rigorous it is, how rational it is, and how well you work with people.
	So just remember the opportunity cost of what you're pursuing could be very high.
	If you end up working in a non-libertarian community, I think it's going to be really rough on you.
	And if you end up working in a libertarian community, then...
	The credentials are going to mean probably a lot less.
	Like, I don't think, you know, Jeff runs laissez-faire books.
	I don't think that they said to him, you know, have you had a New York Times bestselling book?
	Have you taken book publishing in school?
	No, they just looked at his general skills and competence.
	I, an unlettered and unlicensed amateur from the internet, am doing fairly well in getting people to listen because the quality of the thought, I think, is what people look for in the libertarian community.
	So, those would be the two things that I would mention.
	Obviously, it's up to you, but at least consider those.
	There's an additional fact that what's really nice today is that there's a really good chance that within law school you're going to find other libertarians.
	Other people that listen to Stefan Mulliner's I think it's very likely that you'll find colleagues within law school who more or less share your point of view.
	It would be a kind of nice thing to hook up with them and start a little libertarian cell.
	That can be a source of sanity.
	There is a—it's called the Federalist Society.
	It's a very libertarian, conservative-leaning group.
	It's on pretty much all law campuses, but ours is a bit of a joke.
	They do one speaker a month, and they're not really very serious about it.
	But looking for people out of that group would make a lot of sense.
	And a lot of these—I thought I had— I figured a lot of these problems out before I actually began school.
	I thought I had worked out the arguments and justified it to myself.
	But a lot of what you were mentioning that would come after I graduated is starting to really hit me now.
	Ironically, you two were talking about this earlier.
	It's called a legislation and regulations class, and it's all about the regulatory state that's popped up in the last...
	Since the 30s, but especially in the last 40 years or so with all the extra governmental agencies.
	And it could literally be an anti-practical anarchy book because they make all the arguments we hear all the time.
	And that's the class I have the hardest time with because I know what to say.
	I know that they're just leaving out half the argument, but it's just...
	What's the point?
	And that's part of the problem I'm having, because I thought I'd be able to survive three years of this, but boy, it's starting to look like there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, especially with the defense attorney side of things.
	So that's just, I thought I had figured a lot of this out beforehand, but now that I'm in it, it sure seems a lot cloudier.
	So that's just why I wanted to get some clarification on your guys' opinions.
	Well, listen, I know you had some other questions, but we do have some other callers, so if we have time at the end, we'll come back, but I think we'll have to move on to the next one, and best of luck.
	I mean, do drop me a line if you can.
	Let me know what your decision is.
	I'm always curious to see what happens after the Oz curtain closes, but thanks so much for your call, and best of luck with you.
	You know, respect the intellectual abilities that you obviously have to get into law school.
	I mean, you would be a valuable resource to any movement, and I just hate you to get sucked into something that would be very corrupting.
	So, best of luck to you.
	Let me know how it goes, and if we could move on to the next caller, please.
	All right, Joe, go ahead.
	All right.
	Good morning, Stephan and Jeffrey.
	I'm 18 years old, and...
	I'm attending a private liberal arts college.
	I've always been interested in economics, stuff like that.
	Mainly once I started reading about the Federal Reserve, corporatism, banking, and all that, it really got me interested.
	And I started reading about libertarian philosophy, stuff like that, and it just kind of clicked.
	I kind of think that's what I want to do, you know, keep spreading it.
	And even with my friends and stuff, I talk about it and I'm kind of surprised about how open people actually are, at least in my circles, with discussing such ideas.
	At first, you know, usually there's a little hesitance, but as long as I can relate to them and stuff, they start to open up, especially if they respect me, which they do.
	It's always really interesting.
	In college, I want to get a degree in economics.
	I want to learn the economic system as much as I can because I understand its importance and have been affected by it numerous times, especially thanks to my student loans, which is one of the reasons why I'm going to try to graduate early from college.
	I was just kind of wondering if you guys think that going to college and going and getting involved with economics and stuff like that, if that's really the right thing to do and really what can someone who wants to Spread this philosophy, really do either in college or after college.
	I know there's other people my age.
	I've got quite a few friends who want to do something, but it's kind of like, what more can we do?
	I was just curious to see what your thoughts were about that.
	I mean, it's a very big question, of course, and I appreciate you calling in.
	18 is a glorious, glorious age.
	I mean, don't get me wrong, 46 doesn't suck either, but 18 is a glorious age because your whole future, your vista, your horizons, the possibilities are fantastic.
	But the choices, of course, that you make in your youth...
	It's like if you're sailing a ship across an ocean, one or two degrees off course puts you in a different continent.
	And with the previous call or two, it's really important to really think through.
	And of course the challenge is factually your brain is still six or seven years away from its final maturation, but you have to make these decisions now.
	So I really compliment you on that.
	The attention that you're putting into the decisions that you make now.
	How you're going to best spend your life in the pursuit of virtue and happiness.
	I think that of course is the great challenge of life.
	When you live in a corrupt society, virtue does not always lead to happiness.
	We would love to live in a society where the goods were rewarded with jelly beans every time we did the right thing, but unfortunately we live in this really challenging to negotiate society.
	Where vice is very often exceedingly well rewarded and virtue is considerably punished.
	So virtue and happiness, which should be synonymous, are not.
	And so it is a great challenge.
	This is my big lead up into saying I'm not going to answer your question.
	I'm going to toss it over to Jeff because I like the easy ones.
	You know, what color do you like?
	What is the SB that the Africans swallow?
	All the easy questions I will take.
	But Jeff, this one seems quite challenging.
	So I love it.
	Into your propeller blades of reason.
	Well, you know, just as a train is coming by, so I may have to talk over a train.
	Do you hear that?
	I don't know.
	I've got my volume pretty low to make sure there's no echo, but I don't hear anything.
	You can say it's my train of thought.
	This is my train.
	There we go.
	Oh, there you go.
	There you go.
	Commerce.
	Capitalism.
	Okay.
	I've been doing a lot of study on the history of entrepreneurship.
	Everybody knows these days that most of the great entrepreneurs of our time found that college was too much of an opportunity cost to bother with because they had too many great things to do in the world of enterprise.
	I thought this was kind of a new thing, but if you look back all the way to the Gilded Age, great entrepreneurs have really never found much about college that interested them at all.
	A restless vision and beautiful things to do for the world.
	So I think it's really good that if you feel a calling towards life and commerce and entrepreneurship and enterprise, that you not waste your time.
	You're young.
	If you see an opportunity and you just feel this sort of burning passion to jump on it, go for it.
	Don't worry about it.
	And you'll be better off as a result.
	One thing you won't have racked up a gigantic student debt, which is, you know, a form of slavery for people today.
	The student debt nonsense has been catastrophic for a whole generation.
	People graduating with six figures in debt.
	You are not a free person holding a degree and $100,000 of debt.
	And you cannot make any Choices about anything you do.
	At that point, you're completely in a cage.
	You have no options left.
	Your life is just dictated to you.
	It's a terrifying thing, so avoid that no matter what.
	I mean, it seems to me you're far better off dropping out than getting involved in that sort of student debt racket.
	On the other hand, if you do have a calling towards academia, Or that you need that sort of license to practice, you know, say in economics or something.
	College can be a wonderful experience.
	One of the things that I liked most about all the economics classes I took is that the more that I took them and studied the mainstream material, the more beautiful and elegant something like the Austrian tradition of Hayek and Mises are.
	If you just read Hayek and Mises or Rothbard, Or any of this sort of tradition, you know, isolated from what mainstream economics teaches.
	It's cool, it's compelling, it's interesting, it's beautiful.
	But you don't sort of get the fire and the passion and the vastness of the brilliance of the Austrian tradition until you studied the mainstream stuff.
	So I think that's one of the main merits, actually, of going to conventional mainstream economics classes, is that You know, the alternative within the Austrian tradition is all the more spectacular.
	So, for me, it's kind of a fun intellectual game.
	And I rather enjoy it, you know, if you need the degree.
	If the resources are there and it's not going to compromise your own personal freedom and your own independence in the course of getting this college degree, because Lord knows it is absolutely not necessary today to have a college degree in order to have wild success in the commercial world.
	I'm really thrilled to see more and more programs coming along that allow For these kind of one-year experiences, my friend Isaac Morehouse has established a thing called Praxis, which is a one-year program that trains you in the liberal arts and in economics and politics and history of culture and even science and all sorts of things over the course of one year,
	while embedding you within a kind of You know, internet startup or a software firm or some commercial company so that you always maintain your connection to reality.
	That's the really terrible thing about college, is it detaches you from the mainstream of life, you know?
	Praxis tries to embed you within the mainstream of commercial life while giving you a good education.
	Well, you know, and the other thing I would mention as well is that in Canada here, it takes about an average of seven years to get a PhD.
	And let's say that I said, well, I want to do a philosophy show.
	So what I'm going to do is I'm going to spend the next seven years Running up 100,000 or more in debt and getting a PhD in philosophy and then I'm going to start a philosophy show.
	I don't think I'd actually know more about philosophy than having just started up a philosophy show and being batted back and forth with great questions and great challenges and great debates, interviewing great experts, speaking with really smart listeners and so on.
	And so I actually have made money instead of spent money.
	I have learned a lot more about philosophy in the marketplace of ideas which I inhabit rather than If I'd gone to some professor and said, oh, tell me the wise ways of the world, my senior.
	So I think doing with a conscious attention to what you're doing is the best way to learn.
	I didn't take any courses in business before I became an entrepreneur, but I was very conscious and thought a lot about what I was doing as I was doing it.
	And so I think that if you want to learn and you have the opportunity to do and to earn while you're learning, that is the best way to do it, no matter what.
	I mean, I could have a PhD now and be starting off at podcast one.
	Instead, I have, you know, 3,000 podcasts and a bunch of speaking engagements, a documentary coming up and all that, which is actually, I think, practical and useful stuff.
	Could some of the podcasts have been better if I'd done a PhD in philosophy?
	Absolutely, no question, no doubt.
	Would I have the established body of work that I do?
	Would I have the income that I do from the show?
	No, not at all.
	And also time is of the essence, right?
	The four years, I think, next four years are going to be pretty critical, pretty crucial in the freedom movement.
	If you want to reach and teach, you don't need A PhD, right?
	So a lot of the people who defined the libertarian movement, who were into politics and into education, well, what were the only avenues available?
	I mean, they couldn't become journalists.
	The books that they wrote would never have become bestsellers.
	There was no podcasting.
	There was no YouTube.
	So they had to basically, if they wanted to get the message out, they had to go and teach college courses, or they had to go To political candidates and get the political candidates as the big microphone to get the word out there.
	But the internet has changed everything, everything.
	And that which worked in the past or that which was the only available opportunities in the past is no longer what's available now.
	You know, I'm reaching about 100,000.
	People a day on a good day through the show.
	100,000 views and podcast downloads, not to count all the mirrored sites and all the books, which I don't really track.
	But 100,000 people, I mean, in one day, that's more than you'd ever reach in your entire career, far more than you'd ever reach in your entire career as an academic over 40 years.
	I mean, it's 10 times what you'd reach.
	So, given the technology, if you want to reach out and change people or help them get better at thinking, you simply don't need the option of college professor.
	That's what was around before, and I think the people who did that were right to do that.
	It made sense to do that.
	But if you've got, you know, if you spend four years working on how best to communicate in a public forum and doing the hard knocks of just going out there and communicating and getting feedback and trying to improve, I think that you'll end up in a better place, in a better position than going to...
	I want to learn about economics by going to college.
	To me, that's not learn about economics by being an entrepreneur and studying on your own.
	That, to me, is a better approach.
	But we like the security.
	And we also like not having to earn credibility by who we are.
	We like having credibility by our credentials.
	But I think all the people of greatest quality in this world I don't care about your credentials.
	They care about your presentation, your thought, the accuracy, conciseness, and rationality of what it is you propose.
	And that is not going to be helped much at all in college.
	But, you know, that is such a great statement, Stephen.
	And I'm so glad you made it because I had sort of contrasted, you know, being an entrepreneur with being an intellectual as if being an intellectual required this sort of academic path.
	It's nonsense.
	I've gone through a list of my favorite living intellectuals.
	You list the top 20.
	Well, three or four of them actually have It doesn't mean anything, really.
	You can be a great intellectual and a great writer and a great contributor to the world of ideas completely outside of academia without any credentials whatsoever.
	And then I look at the people that I admire the most who are embedded in academia and And it's not because of their embeddedness in that institutional environment that makes them great.
	In fact, it's just the opposite.
	It's the fact that they're sort of the rebels, that they depart from the system, that they kind of smash this system and go against it and do things they're not supposed to do that nobody approves of them to do, and they're regarded as kind of the campus radicals and the revolutionaries.
	That's what's so great about The handful of official academics that I really, really admire is the extent to which they depart from the structure.
	That makes them especially magnificent.
	Well, and the other thing, too, about academics and credentials is they limit the nimbleness of your response to changing conditions.
	So if you go get an economics degree or a law degree or a business degree, then...
	You're pretty much going to focus on those respective disciplines, but what if those respective disciplines are not actually what is most important in changing things?
	Just possibility, right?
	I mean, obviously, I love the philosophy, I love the economics, I love all of that stuff.
	But, you know, in my show, I open the topic to everything, and everyone can bring whatever they want to the table, and one of the great surprises of doing the show was the degree to which people want philosophy to affect their personal decisions, which is kind of what you're calling it about, which I think is fantastic.
	But if all I'd study was economics, and then somebody came in with a, you know, personal problem about some family thing or some marriage thing or some parenting thing, I'd say, well, no, I'm sorry, I've just studied economics, so...
	I can't really answer that question.
	But what if that's actually a really important question to answer?
	You know, what if, you know, my sort of general theories about raising a generation peacefully is the best way to bring about freedom?
	Well, if you've studied economics a lot, you can't really go into those topics.
	But what if those are, in fact, the most topics, the most important topics?
	So I like the nimbleness and responsiveness of simply facing the marketplace and attempting as best you can to volley back whatever it fires at you from whatever direction.
	I really like that nimbleness of response that comes out of my entrepreneurial history But of course, when you become an academic, you are only going to deal with people who are interested in learning economics.
	And you're only going to be teaching economics and other areas.
	You don't have the nimbleness of response because you've already gone for where you're credentialed.
	And that's where your money is going to be.
	That's where your audience is going to be.
	But it's not the real world audience.
	Academics is an audience of people who want to be in academics.
	And there may be some generalists in there, but for the most part, particularly as you get higher up in the field, there are people jumping up for the dangling fruit of PhDs and tenured professorships and so on.
	But I really, really like the nimbleness of just simply facing the market, facing customers, facing the world, and trying as best as I can with as few principles as possible.
	I mean, as few consistent principles as possible, because if it's too complicated, nobody can understand it.
	Really trying to answer questions that are important to people.
	But as soon as you go into a discipline, you're kind of sealed in that discipline.
	And if people are right and it's economics, not whatever I talk about that's the way forward, then good for them and bad for me.
	But if it's not, you're kind of locked in.
	And I think that's not the kind of nimbleness that I think real thinkers are after.
	You know, there's another side to that, and we probably should move on, but let me just add something here.
	Some people want to have it both ways.
	They say, well, I want to go into academia, but the ideas I want to study are only libertarian ideas.
	So I want to study economics, or I want to study the economics of Ludovamises.
	I want to study ethics, but I only want to study the ethical systems of Ayn Rand.
	This is absurd, actually.
	I mean, nobody goes into architecture saying, well, I want to study architecture, but I'm only dedicated to the Bauhaus form and nothing else.
	This can't happen to you.
	If you're going into academia, you've got to go all the way in.
	And you've got to be prepared to just embed yourself in that world completely.
	And if you're not interested in doing that, if you don't have curiosity about other points of view and you don't have the tolerance for that thing, you should just...
	Stale, completely.
	And this is a serious matter, because for years I've received questions from people, and they say, I want to study economics at the graduate level, but I only want to study the Austrian tradition.
	My answer is, why do you want to go to graduate school?
	That's not what graduate schools specialize in, actually.
	If you want to study only the Austrian tradition, study it.
	Move on with your life.
	Forget this graduate school stuff.
	You've got to have a particular vocation.
	To be in graduate school for economics, you get prepared to study everything.
	Everything associated with it.
	And, you know, you get hit with all kinds of nonsense every single day.
	If you have a low tolerance for that, which I totally get, you know, then move on with your life.
	Forget the graduate school.
	Sometimes I think people use schooling as an excuse not to start living.
	I don't know if that's...
	If that's clear what I mean, but sometimes it's best just to start your life rather than just keep delaying and delaying and delaying in the name of education.
	Right.
	So have we sufficiently confused you to make your future course in life completely incomprehensible or has this been at all helpful?
	I think it's been very helpful, especially Jeffrey's comments at the end about being, about Understanding all the philosophies, because that's the only way you can really prove anything, is if you can disprove something else.
	And I think when it comes to economics, telling people something different than what they believe, especially in that, is really difficult.
	And it's also an area where lots of people don't know much about.
	And, you know, that makes it really hard to talk about.
	Like, people who don't know anything about the Federal Reserve, you start talking to them about reserve ratios, and then, you know, that's way over their head.
	And being able to do that, you know, that's important.
	Yeah, and certainly academia will not teach you how to translate things to the masses.
	So I think basically what we're saying, and I don't want to paraphrase Jeff here, we're saying we can either give you a copy of the Kama Sutra, or you can go and actually have sex.
	And that would be...
	If you're 18, and I think I remember 18 pretty well in this regard, the book is not where you want to go.
	So I hope that helps.
	And again, just drop this line, let us know how it goes.
	And yeah, just keep exploding possibilities.
	You know, there are these grooves that society sets up for you, these train tracks that are constantly encouraging you to get on.
	And they are kind of safe because when you make a decision that's different from what society expects, then you are going to face challenge and skepticism and what you've thrown away, your future and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	But I think if you're into this kind of, I think, really good philosophy, if you're into really good philosophy, then I think that you do have to question everything.
	And I think that experience is better than learning.
	And the opportunity cost of education, you've got to really strongly justify them.
	Certainly with an undergraduate degree, it's hard to justify it.
	You've got an undergrad in economics.
	That's cost you four years, probably two, three hundred thousand bucks in debt and missed opportunities.
	And what does it get you?
	If you go all the way, then you're even more in the hole and so on and it becomes...
	And it's also confining.
	The more that you...
	You know, this is a fallacy of sunk cost, right?
	So the more...
	One of the reasons why you can't become a professor unless you get a PhD, which didn't used to be the case.
	I had a professor of English at McGill who only had a BA, but he was like...
	He made Methuselah look like Ricky Schroeder.
	He was incredibly old, so he could get a professorship back in the day with only a BA. But one of the reasons why you have to have a PhD is that you become incredibly conservative the more you invest in something because the risk of failing at it becomes just that much greater.
	If you go all the way through getting a PhD, you know, you've spent, what, 10, 12, 15 years and you're in debt huge amounts and you've become radically unfit for anything else.
	And so you become incredibly conservative.
	Like you just have to get that academic job.
	Whatever you have to do, whatever compromises you have to make, you're just going to make them.
	It's a way of making sure that people are incredibly conservative and don't rock the boat.
	You know, like this tenureship was originally designed to protect radical thinkers.
	Now it actually just ensures that nobody who's actually radical will ever get hired because you can't get rid of them.
	So I'd really try and get you out into the world sooner rather than later unless there's some real compelling reason for it.
	So thank you very much.
	I think up next we have Kaliub.
	Kaliub.
	Kaliub.
	Caleb, you're next.
	Ah, there you go.
	Hello.
	Somebody who respects the listeners.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, first of all, it's a great honor to talk to you and Jeff of your books, so thank you for putting those out.
	Oh, thank you.
	Thanks, yeah.
	My question was, I'm an engineer, kind of a technical type, who just kind of recently discovered the joy of being in a live theater.
	I'm a local community theatre, and it's been a great time, really eye-opening.
	I'm sorry I didn't do it before.
	Do you mean watching or doing?
	Doing.
	I've been in a few shows, and it's going to be...
	I've got some Shakespeare coming up.
	That's so cool!
	How exciting!
	James Woods actually has a master's in engineering.
	He's, I think, a very twitchy, intense, and great actor.
	The Boost, which is not a great film, has just an incredible performance by him as a cocaine addict, I think it is.
	So, you know, you're in good company if you've got a technical degree and you like the arts.
	So, go ahead.
	Well, I know that in high school I was still a technical type and I kind of loudly decried theater, especially Shakespeare, as antiquated and not speaking to modern audiences.
	Yeah, I said a lot of things very loudly as high schoolers, aged folks are like to do.
	But now that I'm into it, I can really see the value and brilliance of theatre in general and Shakespeare in particular.
	I wanted to know what you guys thought.
	I know you guys have a very unique combination of respect for modernity with also really appreciation for what's come before.
	There are certain figures that emerge in the history of known humanity that just sort of soar above the rest.
	And I would say Bach and Mozart and Shakespeare are easy choices in that regard.
	The beautiful thing about Shakespeare is He touches into the human imagination.
	He deals with all these extremely difficult and complex human dilemmas, moral problems, and doesn't give you, in a sense, doesn't give you the answers out on a plate.
	That's what's so fun about him.
	It sparks imagination.
	And it's a tribute to me.
	Persistence of human problems, of freedom, of power, of envy, and jealousy, rage, and impulse for peace, and all these kind of Things that we recognize ourselves so completely.
	And, you know, all the works of Shakespeare.
	So, no, there's some art and some literature that just will last forever.
	I have the highest respect for this.
	And the reason is that I myself am a writer.
	And the day after I've written anything, I pretty much don't like it anymore.
	And a year later, I don't even want to look at it because it strikes me as terribly dated and absurd.
	But great literature still has more meaning later than it did even when it came out.
	And Shakespeare is one of those things.
	I hope you agree with me, but that's certainly my point of view.
	Yeah, I mean, the wonderful thing about Shakespeare is the incredible compression of thought In his words.
	And thought and emotion.
	So, for example, there's a line from King Lear.
	I played Gloucester in King Lear, the guy who gets his eyes gouged out.
	And fortunately, not that much of a method actor.
	I didn't do what Dustin Hoffman did when he was acting in The Marathon Man with Laurence Olivier.
	He had to play a torture victim.
	And he didn't eat for two days, didn't sleep for a day and a half and so on, and showed up just ragged and all that.
	Of course, Laurence Olivier leaned forward and said, my dear boy, why don't you just act?
	Which was quite the difference between the British and the American school of acting.
	But in King Lear, there's a line which says, basically, let's have a society where – ten words – distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
	That distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
	I mean, that's socialism, that's communism, that's redistributionism, that's the welfare state in a nutshell.
	Distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
	What an incredibly compressed statement.
	And you see that all the time in Shakespeare.
	So, from that standpoint, I think nobody has done intergenerational conflict As well as Shakespeare has.
	I mean, in King Lear, the idea of speaking bare honesty to vainglorious power in the form of Cordelia speaking to King Lear.
	Regan and Goneril, the two sisters, give all these flowery speeches.
	King Lear says, how much do you love me, my children?
	And they give all these flowery, I love you, the sun, the moon, blah, blah, blah.
	And it's all nonsense.
	They don't.
	They're just flattering his narcissistic ego.
	And then Cordelia says, well, I love you as much as my station, no more, no less, blah, blah, blah.
	Which is, again, kind of a petty way to talk about it.
	And he's not lovable, but he needs to be told that he's loved and without being a master.
	I don't know, can you plot spoil stuff that's 500 years old, 400 years old?
	I don't know.
	But it sets into events, this chain of events that results in the destruction of the kingdom.
	But there's this wonderful speech at the end that we should speak what we feel, not what we think we ought to say.
	And again, that's wonderful advice.
	In Hamlet, Polonius, a shallow, vainglorious court toady, has these great speeches about being honest, being true, and all of that.
	Above all else, let to thine own self be true, and then it shall follow as night follows day.
	That can't not be false to anyone.
	And I think, so there's these great, thought-provoking, amazing, powerful statement, as King Lear says in the middle of the storm, what is man but a bare, forked animal?
	You know, like a little stick figure, the little fork at the bottom that kids draw, a bare, forked animal.
	The speech from Hamlet about the two oppositions of man, noble and glorious, and yet this thing of dust, the idea that you can live a life of the mind and be larger than your circumstances, he says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I could be bound in a nutshell and still I still consider myself king of infinite space, but that I have bad dreams.
	So he gives this incredible window into the complexities of consciousness and conscience itself, intergenerational conflict, change, growth, honesty versus flattery.
	I mean, there's nothing in the human condition that you can't dig up in Shakespeare.
	That having been said, I mean, he was a state-sucking toady.
	I played Macbeth, and one of the things that I found What's really morally repulsive in the play of Macbeth is the beginning of Macbeth is, you know, he's a warrior.
	He's a hitman.
	He's a paid killer for King Duncan.
	And he's out there slaughtering probably unarmored and badly armed peasants, you know, by the bushelful.
	I mean, he's basically dragging 30 heads back with him when he comes back to the king.
	And Shakespeare has no problem with that whatsoever.
	He doesn't get any bad dreams.
	He's perfectly happy.
	You know, he hoses off the peasants' blood from his hands and then goes and kisses his wife and is a wonderful guy and all that.
	But then he dares to kill the king and, you know, all the curses of voodoo sleeplessness hit him and all of that.
	And he has that wonderful speech.
	Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
	Out, out, brief candle.
	Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
	It is a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot signifying nothing.
	It's an incredible speech.
	And that compression of nihilism and moral and emotional exhaustion only applies when he dares spill the blood of the rulers.
	When he spills the blood many times over of the peasants, not a single thing is mentioned.
	So again, he had to live in his time.
	He had to live in a time of extreme censorship.
	His very popularity would have made him an enormous target for anyone who would have desired to kill him for speaking out anything.
	So there is that warping effect of a very dangerous hitman nobility that was in power in England at the time.
	And I think that's really important.
	So I don't go to Shakespeare for politics.
	I do go to Shakespeare for incredibly concentrated philosophy.
	I mean, I'm not the most succinct guy in the world, but it's something to strive for.
	And also for his wide-ranging passions.
	But you go to Shakespeare for concentrated thought, for incredibly thought-provoking monologues.
	And for intergenerational conflicts, for when the world is changing, what happens to the elder generation versus the younger generation, the conflicts of wise traditions versus new possibilities.
	These are things you can go to Shakespeare for.
	And again, we're just talking about Shakespeare.
	You can also get a lot of these things from Dickens.
	You can get a lot from Dostoevsky as well.
	Again, understanding that they lived in very circumscribed times when it came to the honest expression of thought and And conscience in art.
	But also the other thing, I'll just stop here because I really could go on all day about this stuff.
	But what is also really important to get from the great artists is the recognition that the majority of life, even if you are the best of the best, is failure.
	You know, there are maybe 10 or 11 Shakespearean plays which are regularly produced, regularly performed.
	I mean, obviously, you know, Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
	I mean, you sort of go through the list.
	But he wrote like 52 plays.
	And, you know, who knows A Winter's Tale?
	You know, who knows some of these, you know, endless ones about the Wars of the Roses and so on.
	So Shakespeare, you know, an incredible genius, still only was batting about 20% when it came to the longevity of his work.
	If you look at the hundreds of sonnets and people know, you know, the average person who's reasonably educated maybe knows five or seven, maybe 10 or 15 if you're more educated.
	But that's batting 10%, you know.
	So batting 100 is what the very greatest geniuses can do.
	Batting 200 For your plays is what the greatest playwright in history can do.
	If you look at the Dickensian novels, he wrote dozens of them, of which there are maybe five or seven, which are considered classics and still regularly studied and sold.
	So, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, yes, it's a real novel, but not many people know it.
	So, he's, again, batting 100 or 200.
	So, it gives you, you know, I get, every two or three years, I get a video that goes up for half a million views.
	You know, that's batting a whole lot less than 100 or 200, but...
	It does give you a sense that even if I was the greatest communicator in human history, the best I could hope for is one out of ten to be a real classic.
	So it does help you with humility as well.
	I don't know if that answers anything, but go ahead.
	Stefan Mullen, that was an unbelievable answer.
	I just can't believe how eloquent and thrilling your answer was.
	So thank you.
	Every now and then I do accidentally rip one off.
	It's nice.
	It's nice when they all come together.
	That was just epic.
	It's just beautiful.
	One quick comment.
	You know, sometimes I worry that public school destroys Shakespeare.
	You know, lots of people go through life having experienced things in public school and that's just...
	You know, whatever they learned or were forced to read in public school, it was just terrible, not worth revisiting.
	The best way to rediscover Shakespeare, to my mind, is just to gather some friends together.
	You know, get a half a dozen people and schedule.
	It's not that difficult.
	Schedule a Saturday evening where you're just going to do a reading of King Lear or Hamlet or something.
	And start at about 4 o'clock, pour up some drinks and just start reading.
	You'll have a wonderful time to discover Shakespeare in a completely new way, and you'll never forget it.
	I mean, that's a great way to spend a night.
	How much better is that use of that time, that evening, than practically anything else you can ever think of?
	That's a great thing to do.
	For me, anyway, a wonderful source for that sort of stuff is Oscar Wilde, who wrote four absolutely brilliant plays.
	There's nothing like an evening with friends sitting around performing Oscar Wilde plays.
	You don't have to be a member of a community theater or get arts funding to do this stuff.
	You can do it in your own home.
	That's just one of the rights, human rights, we have that we should exercise, I think.
	Yes, and the wonderful thing about art is It's the degree to which it is social.
	If you want to get to know someone, read Hamlet together and talk about what you think about the arguments put forward.
	The scene where Hamlet is considering, again, sorry for the spoilers, you've got to read this.
	You've got to.
	And also you might want to watch, although it relies very heavily on the Freudian incestuous themes, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet I think is one of the best.
	Mel Gibson's one is pretty good.
	But I would really recommend the Laurence Olivier one, plus what a dashing and vividly handsome and believably charismatic young performer he was.
	But anyway, if you get together and you read Hamlet with someone and say, well, what do you think of this?
	What do you think of that?
	The argument that Hamlet is going to kill Claudius and he says, well, but if I kill him, he's praying at the moment.
	He's in a state of prayer.
	If I kill him now, he goes straight to heaven because he's in a moment of grace and I end up going to hell.
	What an incredible argument.
	That is, about the degree to which we can take vengeance.
	Even if you take the theological aspect out of it, the degree to which we should take vengeance not in the moment.
	Self-defense, we all recognize, in the moment is valid, right?
	But can we go to the guy two days later?
	Well, probably not, right?
	And also, I think Hamlet is a wonderful explication of a Renaissance thinker in a medieval environment.
	And this is part of the intergenerational conflict that you see.
	That the older generation in Hamlet is clearly deeply embedded in the Middle Ages.
	And Hamlet is a Renaissance thinker.
	He has all of the complexity and ambiguity that began to characterize the post-scholastic tradition of the Renaissance and seeing this collision.
	I mean, I think it's a shame in a way that Shakespeare has to constantly put sword fights in where none are particularly necessary.
	But, you know, you've got to have your Transformers to get people to go to the philosophy.
	But learn about your friends.
	Sit and read art with your friends.
	Do recognize that after you read Oscar Wilde, you will be embarrassed to ever make a joke again.
	The man was so sublimely witty and unbelievably delightful that you're just embarrassed to ever make jokes again.
	I try and overcome it, but you just can't.
	It's like trying to sing along with somebody to love.
	It's just an embarrassment.
	The beautiful thing about Oscar Wilde is that it infuses within you a sense of delight for life and detachment from the world around you.
	It allows you to kind of You know, be amused by things rather than furiated by them, which is just such a help in navigating this world.
	Yes, and of course, they recognize the degree of tragedy that occurred to him.
	He was obviously gay in a time when homosexuality, much like sort of it was in the 20th century, homosexuality was not a problem, of course, in the ancient world, as Oscar Wilde pointed out when he was being prosecuted for homosexuality, because apparently he liked a bit of rough trade, going down to the docks and finding gay sort of...
	Sailors and so on.
	And he said, you know, well, this homosexuality in the ancient world, we all respect and love the Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.
	Homosexuality in ancient Sparta was part of the warrior tradition.
	So we live in this weird bubble of time where homosexuality has become a problem, whereas throughout a lot of human history and particularly in the entire foundation of Western culture and civilization, homosexuality was core and central to that whole tradition.
	So realizing the degree to which you can When we live in a time, it's just the world.
	But the great thing about historical perspective is you recognize the degree to which the times that you live in are just the times that you live in.
	And free thought is praised or attacked at various points throughout human history.
	And to recognize the degree to which you are going to be subjected to the wildly swinging, blindsided prejudices of your society...
	But it's just your society.
	It's not all of history.
	And of course, what he was prosecuted for, it's what I remember when facing the calumny of inevitable hostility, is that Meletus, the guy who prosecuted Socrates, is now remembered as one of the cosmic assholes of history.
	You know, as are the people who prosecuted Oscar Wilde and so on.
	They basically trod on one of the most beautiful flowers of Western literature.
	And so, you know, the people who persecute you today are just the assholes of tomorrow.
	And I think that perspective is really important.
	He died himself, I believe, in Paris.
	He was impoverished, friendless.
	I mean, almost as a beggar, if you can imagine such a thing.
	And then even for the following...
	Because, you know, he left jail.
	He wrote, you know, the...
	Ballad of Reading Jail, which everybody should read, my god, what a libertarian classic.
	But then also De Profundi is a sort of personal letter to his one-time true love.
	And then was exiled, had to leave, and became essentially a beggar, became very sick, and had a very difficult life, and then died.
	And even for the following five and ten years in English culture and the newspapers and everything, He was not a fashionable figure.
	He was denounced as an evil decadent who was a grand diversion, once beloved, but my god, you know, that was a catastrophic interest that we English people had, and let's move on away from this terrible, terrible influence.
	And so even after he died for five and even ten years, He was considered, you know, somebody, his plays were not performed.
	And everybody seemed to agree that he was essentially a force for evil.
	Well, I mean, of course, England was a great colonial power at the time and therefore needed the brutality of anti-sensuality.
	It needed the coldness Of the separation of children from mothers in boarding schools and so on.
	So, as a brutal empire, it was decidedly anti-sensual.
	I mean, the sort of sensuality of the body, and by that I mean sexuality and food and massages and exercise and all of that kind of stuff.
	The sensuality of the body is directly opposed to things like controlling others and imperialism and so on.
	And he wrote very openly in the picture of Dorian Gray.
	I quoted it in my master's thesis about wishing to develop a new philosophy of the senses, a new philosophy of sensuality.
	This was counter, enormously counter, to the need for the male disposability and brutality and hostility to the body that is foundational to repression and war and empire and all of that.
	You can see the same stuff going on in the United States as well.
	His health was broken in this terrible British prison.
	He died.
	The only thing that was marginally salvationary about his death was he did come up with one of the best death lines in history.
	He was in a terrible rented room, I think, in Paris, and he'd been catching drinks and food from people by just telling witty stories, and he just basically became a busker after being one of the towering figures of Western theatre.
	And he was dying in this horrible room with the ugliest surroundings, which, of course, you know, as an esthet and he would have been very sensitive to, and basically he looked at this ghastly, hideous wallpaper, and his last words apparently were, well, one of us has to go, which I think is...
	You know, to have that level of wit, even when facing the great dark, is, to me, truly staggering.
	You know, it was, I think, within 15 years after his death that England repealed all of its anti-sodomy legislation.
	They stopped the war on gay people.
	And that was the turning point in English history away from, as you say, this sort of imperial late Victorian attitudes towards a more liberal spirit.
	And it changed everything.
	What a benefactor to humanity Oscar really was.
	Because he sacrificed, you know, really deeply and didn't live to see the change, but the change came, you know?
	And now, exactly as you said, his persecutors are the disgraced ones.
	And we look back in horror.
	But it took a few years.
	I mean, it took 15 or 20 years for people to say, my God, what did we as a society do to this great, great What did we do?
	What were we thinking?
	That was really brutal.
	That was really stupid.
	Let's fix this.
	I like the story.
	He took one of the greatest defenses in human history, which is it's the Jewish defense to persecution, which is to be so incredibly enjoyable.
	That you just can't hate them.
	I mean, just to be so enormously enjoyable, and this, I think, is a Jewish commitment to humor, and it's a pretty wise strategy, which is to be so enormously enjoyable that you just can't ever have a holocaust where you have a Jerry Seinfeld.
	And I think it's a very intelligent strategy, whether it's conscious or not, I don't know, but it is.
	And then, ah, this is the thing that's so frustrating, is that wouldn't it be great, and, you know, Christians, I think, of all people should be really focused on this, wouldn't it be great to have a society where you could have progress without martyrs?
	I mean, my God, wouldn't that be just astoundingly wonderful?
	And Christians who found the religion on the martyrdom of somebody who wanted to bring progress to theology should really understand this.
	We should not have to keep throwing people into these wood chippers in order to build a better future, but it still seems to be so common.
	At least now, they're just put in prison for 20 years rather than outright killed.
	I completely agree.
	I'm always cautious about this.
	It's not that Oscar suffered for us in some sense.
	He loved and he lived and he embraced the best of the human spirit both in his literature and in his life and he was persecuted unnecessarily and severely.
	He never wanted to undergo what happened to him.
	What he wanted to do Was live an authentic, sincere life driven by art, truth, and above all else, love.
	And he just acted like that.
	That's the way he lived.
	And sadly, you know, he was persecuted.
	It's not anything he ever wanted.
	And it's not because he was persecuted that he ended up You know, giving such gifts to humanity.
	It's just the problem is that there's a kind of a time disconnect between certain truths that happen at our time and the delay that comes for politics and culture and the social order to embrace those truths.
	And that's very frustrating.
	It's very frustrating, I think, for all of us right now, because we see so much So many truths of human freedom and the love and humanitarianism that should be animating our world, and yet we look around and we see despotism and brutality and victims of the system everywhere.
	And we get impatient.
	We get impatient.
	Progress is so often wrapped up in remorse.
	We feel really bad about what happened, so we will allow a few shreds of light to break into the dark cave.
	We feel bad about what we did to Socrates, so he's okay now.
	We feel bad about what we did to Oscar Wilde or Jesus, so okay, there are positive forces now.
	And it will happen.
	We'll feel bad about what we did to Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden or all of the horrible things that have happened to the soldiers who went over in the wars of imperialism.
	We feel bad about all of this stuff.
	But my God, can we not have progress without the bloodstains of regret on our conscience?
	It just seems to be a hard thing.
	We can't seem as a species to listen to reason and evidence.
	We must always be bouncing back From regret and guilt and shame to allow some shreds of progress forward.
	Anyway, that's my bitter statement, but it does seem a little frustrating.
	It is frustrating.
	Yeah, very frustrating.
	Well, thank you very much for your answer.
	That really helped me, I think, understand why it's important to look back at these great writers and authors.
	And, of course, also to remember that I can do all this without paying a royalty.
	This is all without intellectual property.
	Shakespeare himself was a commercial writer.
	My friend Paul Cantor at the University of Virginia loves the movie Shakespeare in Love because it highlights the commercialism of William Shakespeare.
	Oh, he was a grasping and greedy bourgeoisie who tried to marry up and then retired.
	No, he was definitely a very astute capitalist, and this is why, of course, he throws in the clowns and the sword fights, because he knows he's got to get the groundlings to come into the play.
	Well, I think we have another caller.
	Mike, if you'd like to bring them front and center.
	Sure.
	John, you're up next.
	Go ahead.
	Hey, Stefan.
	It's been a while.
	How are you?
	I'm fantastic, man.
	A lot has changed since you and I at last talk.
	All for the better.
	No, what I wanted to say before I get to my question was you and Jeffrey's speech on schooling and on education really resonated very deeply with me because I am self-taught in the field.
	I did contemplate getting my master's, but my sister Christy once said that brilliance does not require paper.
	And that's something I held dear to myself.
	So I've been self-teaching and really, Stefan, to you personally, I never got a chance to formally thank you because our encounter at Porkfest and seeing the brand you created with philosophy and seeing what you could do with the field in an age like 2013 when so many people kind of put their nose down at it, at least in my experience, It really inspired me to go home and start, as you know, my firm, Intellectis brand, which I'm quite proud of.
	So it's just an honor to be here with you and to just formally thank you at last.
	So I really appreciate it.
	And it meant a great deal to me.
	Well, thank you.
	Listen, be sure to put out, what's the website that people can visit you at?
	Well, my website, right now I'm doing writings.
	Pretty soon I'll be doing my own show on Blip, but for right now my writings would be www.issu.com forward slash forum underscore intellectus.
	Yeah, that's a mouthful there.
	Have you ever given a thought to marketing?
	If you have to spell out the website name, now I say this with three domain radio, which I have to spell out, but you know, just something you might want to, you might want to create a tiny URL for that.
	It's just my thought.
	I've I'm looking to upgrade to business cards, but we're not that savvy yet.
	I'm hoping we get there in due time.
	Okay, so what's your question?
	Yes, my question.
	I wanted to discuss with you an essay I wrote a few months back.
	I truly believe it's one of my best.
	You know that you and I – well, I don't think we've ever discussed economics, but I am a capitalist.
	I do believe in the free market.
	But a young man, I don't know if you ever heard of this case.
	I thought it was a very intriguing case.
	Aaron Schwartz wrote a...
	Yes, yes, thank you.
	In fact, Jeff and I did a show on Aaron Schwartz a couple of months ago.
	Yeah, we did like a 30-minute tribute to him, didn't we, Stefan?
	Yeah.
	So, hearing his case and how he downloaded all these scholastic journals, hacked into JSTOR, downloaded all the journals, and was going to distribute them among third world nations, particularly Africa and the like, and seeing that Carmen Ortiz and somebody else's name I can't recollect right now, really brought the hammer down hard on him, which disgusted me.
	Because the sentence he got, I think, was way too gross for his offense, especially when you take into account That he did return the intellectual property to JSTOR, and they didn't even want to press charges.
	I think MIT may have wanted to do something, but the legal action they would have wanted to take was punitive in comparison to what Carmen Ortiz grabbed him by the throat with.
	But hearing Aaron's story and seeing what he was all about really inspired me to believe, well, I am a free market capitalist economically, but information speaking and knowledge speaking You could almost say that I'm kind of a socialist.
	I do believe in what Aaron tried to do.
	And I did some of my own research for this essay, and particularly in Africa we find, at least according to the research I've done, that one in three children living in Africa will drop out of school.
	Ninety-eight percent of people who are illiterate and lack writing skills are residents of developing countries.
	And lastly, it is estimated that thirty to fifty percent of children in developing countries who leave school after four to six years are neither literate nor are they numerate.
	So you can really see the gap in terms of the human capital, you know, in these developing nations.
	And I go on and on about it.
	Pretty much, Stefan, my question to you is, what do you think about Aaron Schwartz's goal, and pretty much what I have pretty much gift wrapped and put a bow tie on it of, You know, information socialism to really increase human capital in these developing countries which in turn may help their markets economically.
	Look, I mean, the first thing to recognize is that the patent system is socialist.
	Anything which relies on the initiation of the use of force for the transfer of income is fundamentally socialist in its fact.
	So when you say that you're sort of anti-IP but pro-socialist, I would argue that you're in fact pro-free markets when you're anti-IP. IP is a socialist program designed to reward The media in return for the media's allegiance to the state.
	It gives them a monopoly on their products and therefore they're going to not question or oppose or attack the state in the same way that getting government unions, government protected unions into the media makes sure that unions are basically usually not criticized.
	But look, the sentencing of Schwartz, he was facing decades in jail.
	The sentencing of Bradley Manning, the hysterical calls for the death penalty, basically the assassination of Julian Assange.
	This is an article written that I just looked up while you were mentioning this.
	This is an article written by Michael Moore, and he's got some great stuff to say about this stuff.
	So this is Bradley Manning.
	Now, I can't remember.
	I think he got a couple of decades in jail.
	So he wrote, when his sentencing is announced tomorrow, he wrote this before the sentencing, we'll all get a good idea of how seriously the U.S. military takes different crimes.
	So, for instance, Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, and the senior officer present the night of the murder of Iraqi prisoner Manad al-Ajamadi received no jail time, no jail time, but he was reprimanded and fined, ooh, $8,000.
	Pappas was heard to say about Al Jammadi, I'm not going down for this alone.
	Sergeant Sabrina Harmon, the woman famously seen giving a thumbs up next to Al Jammadi's body and in another photo smiling next to naked hooded Iraqis stacked on each other, in Abu Ghraib was sentenced to six months in prison for maltreating detainees.
	Specialist Armin Cruz was sentenced to eight months for abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and covering up the abuse.
	Specialist Stephen Rybordy was sentenced to eight months for being an accessory to the murder of four Iraqi prisoners who were bound, blindfolded, shot and dumped in a canal in Baghdad in 2007.
	Four murders he gets eight months.
	Specialist Belmore Ramos was sentenced to seven months for conspiracy to commit murder in the same case.
	Sergeant Michael Leahy Jr.
	was sentenced to life in prison for committing the four Baghdad murders.
	The military then granted him clemency and reduced his sentence to 20 years with parole possible after seven years.
	So after seven years!
	This man can be released from prison for murdering four helpless detainees.
	Marine Sergeant Frank D. Wooderich received no jail time for negligent dereliction in the massacre of 24 unarmed men, women and children in 2005 in the Iraqi town of Haditha.
	Seven other members of his battalion were charged, but none were punished in any way.
	Marine Lance Corporal Jerry Shumeti and Lance Corporal Tyler Jackson were both sentenced to 21 months for the aggravated assault of Hashim Ibrahim Awad, 52, a father of 11 and grandfather of 4, in Helmandanya in 2006.
	Awad died after being shot during the assault.
	Their sentences were later Reduced.
	Two more.
	Marine Lance Corporal Robert Pennington was sentenced to eight years for the same incident, but only served a few months before being granted clemency and released from prison.
	Marine Sergeant G. Hachias III was sentenced to 15 years for murder in the Awad case, but his conviction was soon overturned and he was released.
	No soldiers received any punishment for the killing of five Iraqi children, four women and two men in one.
	Ishaqi home in 2006.
	Among the US diplomatic cables leaked by Bradley Manning was email from a UN official stating that US soldiers had executed all of them.
	When WikiLeaks published the cable, the uproar in Iraq was so big that the Nouri al-Malaki government couldn't grant any remaining US troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, thus forcing the Obama administration to abandon its plans to keep several thousand US soldiers permanently.
	All the U.S. troops were removed at the end of 2011.
	So, this is just an example of the idea that there is no such thing as the rule of law.
	There is the random, fiery, balrog-style whips of those in power.
	And those in power relied upon torture, or believed that they needed torture, in order to get information.
	Torture is Incredibly counterproductive, even if you take aside the unbelievable moral horror of torture, as far as a way of gaining information, it is completely and ridiculously counterproductive.
	Not even unproductive, it's counterproductive.
	Because most times you're questioning people, they don't know.
	They don't know the answer because any intelligent person when faced with torture is just going to fess up.
	So they don't know the answer, but what happens is they make up an answer in order to avoid torture, and then the government spends all of its resources chasing these ghosts, these imaginary things.
	It's all a bunch of Kaiser So-Say nonsense.
	And so there's no possible productivity in the realm of torture.
	But the government doesn't have smart, intelligent, aware, market-driven enough people to actually go and pursue criminals in productive ways, so it just tortures because they're a bunch of sadists and it likes torture.
	So people who are caught for torture get slaps on the wrist, get fines, get sentenced to lengthy sentences which are then commuted, people who murder, because it's the foundation.
	Of state power is violence, so it's never going to prosecute violence.
	However, the exposure of state crimes goes against state power, right?
	The capacity to torture, murder, extraordinary rendition, all of that, that is foundational to state power.
	So there'll be a slap on the wrist for the sake of public appearance.
	But anybody who actually shows the crimes of the state, releases and reveals the crimes of the state, well, they must be punished in a truly You know, this just tells you that there's nothing objective that's going on in the realm of the state when it comes to punishment.
	Aaron Schwartz was punished for a wide variety of reasons, but mostly the government is terrified of exposure.
	The government can record you going everywhere in the world.
	The government can get your GPS signals.
	The government has CCTV cameras everywhere.
	But you try pointing a camera at a cop, at a government official, you try recording, and you are usually in a whole heap of trouble.
	And one of the great positives, of course, is that there is enough recording equipment out there.
	That people like Antonio Beeler and others can actually get video evidence exonerating them of the historical crimes that they're accused of.
	So, yeah, I mean, this all started for me, and I'll just touch on this very briefly.
	I remember during the Bill Clinton scandals of the early 90s where he was found to just be a truly repulsive and deviant and perverse sexual predator.
	I remember thinking, oh man, you know, boy, society, this guy's going to be impeached and disbarred, and his career's going to be over by the end of the week, because we just came out of the Clarence Thomas thing where Anita Hill was complaining of his sexual harassment because he may or may not have made a joke about pubic hands on a Coke can, none of which was ever proven to my knowledge.
	I mean, this just went on for years and years and years, and his nomination was going to be barred, and of course it was just left-wing attacks upon conservatives.
	But having just come out, I was still mistakenly thinking that there were some principles in society because, you know, it was 20 years ago.
	You know, cut me a break.
	You know, I was still a baby in arms when it came to philosophy.
	And so I remember when all of this stuff came out about Clinton inserting cigars into the poor vagina of his personal geisha and while on the phone doing official business, getting blowjobs and stuff, I just remember thinking, oh, my God, given what happened to Clarence Thomas, He's going to be out of office in days.
	I just remember thinking what an incredible moment in history this is and seeing what happened with a little bit of wiretapping and how Nixon was hounded out of office for something that LBJ and JFK and everyone had done before him.
	I just remember thinking, my God, I mean the feminists and they're just going to go completely nuts because this is about a billion times worse than what happened with Clarence Thomas.
	And then what happened?
	Almost nothing.
	Almost nothing.
	The man still speaks.
	He's paid $100,000 to speak at events.
	He's a respected elder statesman.
	My God!
	We live in a psychotic world of sociopathic manipulation of rules for the sake of creating punishment and guilt among the livestock.
	It has nothing to do with any principle.
	So the prosecution of Aaron Schwartz, yeah, he's a guy who can shine a light in dark corners and therefore he must be punished in order to avoid other people from revealing the crimes of the state.
	Now, the state is criminality, but of course, most people stay in the matrix and assume that the government obeys its own laws.
	The more that people can dig into the data and show that it doesn't, you'll just see that if the government fears exposure, you know, cockroaches don't like sunlight.
	And if the government fears exposure, they will lash out hysterically and punish it.
	It has nothing to do with any rules.
	All it has to do is self-protection.
	And, you know, it's like saying, well, you know, the mafia head who killed the accountant who was about to cooperate with the feds is doing it on a moral basis for justice and law and so on.
	No, it's just that he could reveal the secrets of the mafia to the government and therefore they're going to kill him.
	And the same thing is obviously occurring with all of the people who are exposing government crimes.
	Okay, end of rant.
	Sorry, Jeff, if you'd like.
	I feel like your commentary, to me, really illuminates a very important point, and that's that I feel like our media in this day and age, it's like living in the modern allegory of Plato's cave.
	We're all making shadow puppets, and only very few of us come out, and we see the sun, and we have to go back down and tell everybody else about it.
	But, you know, my thing is your whole commentary and your sentiments on torture and coercion and a state that, you know, props itself up with the use of force.
	That, to me, just really raises even more so the critical importance of what Aaron Swartz is doing and what, you know, I wrote in this essay.
	Again, you know, information socialism, as I called it.
	But my question is, and this will be my last question on the matter, what is the best route to take?
	Because I can understand people who are opposed to my course of action because, you know, you're talking things like essays and scholastic journals or, you know, intellectual property.
	I would go on some formal databases.
	Some papers to download cost $50.
	But I feel like the information to people in the third world is so invaluable.
	I don't want to make any money.
	Off of my essays.
	You know, part of my goal in being a philosopher, for me personally, was making the field and making the discourses that I started accessible to everybody, no matter the level of education, no matter the level of anything.
	So, if we want to make information this powerful revolutionary tool, and again, you made a great video that I watched just the other day, the 55-minute commentary on Cereal, which I recommend that everybody go watch on Steph's YouTube channel at StephBot.
	Just a quick plug for you there.
	I really enjoyed that video.
	You know, that's the stuff that I think people need to be listening to because that's stuff that empowers, that's stuff that engages, that's stuff that enlightens.
	So how do we do it, Steph?
	I mean, how do we please our philosophy of the market so that people can still get their monies worth, so to speak, on their intellectual property, but we still achieve the aim of enlightening those around us?
	I mean, is it a foolhardy goal or is it something that, you know, like I'm trying to do now that we should just continue to pursue and see if we yield any results?
	Well, I can't possibly speak better on IP than Jeff, so Jeff, would you like to...
	I'm glad this subject came up.
	I had a friend write me a couple of days ago and say that he had written a book and he wanted to distribute it in a libertarian way.
	I wasn't sure what that way was.
	He said, my sense is that I need to give it away for free and then ask for donations.
	And I said, well, if that works for you, that's great.
	But just remember that the way to do things in a libertarian way is to not use the state.
	Maybe that sounds very obvious, but people forget this.
	So there's nothing wrong with taking a non-scarce good like the information in a book and charging for the scarce delivery of that book, if that works out to be a good thing.
	When you buy an M33 from iTunes, you're not really buying a song.
	What you're doing is buying an increment of service use, which you could argue is a scarce good.
	It's the same thing with buying a copy of a book off Amazon with Kindle.
	You're not You're not buying really a book.
	What you're doing is buying an incremental service delivery in which this non-scarce good called a book is delivered to you.
	Maybe that's a good way to do it, and it doesn't necessarily require the state at all.
	At Laissez-faire Books, we started a subscription model for books that are entirely published in the comments.
	So one of the conditions I made when I went to work for Laissez-faire Books, I said to these people who run Agora Financial, I said, you know, I just can't in good conscience use I don't want to use the state in any aspect of our business.
	I don't want to use copyright.
	They were a little bit, you know, alarmed by this and confused by the implications of it.
	I said, you know, I don't think it's going to make any difference to our business model, but it is going to make a difference in terms of the moral status of the products we produce.
	So everything we produce is in the commons, but what we're attempting to do is charge for the delivery of this product, of this service, in which we give You know, books away every two weeks, and by now we're up to, I think, something like 100 books that you can get for like 10 bucks.
	These are mostly all new books with new introductions and things.
	So I'm not using the state at all, but just because you're not using the copyright institution doesn't mean that you can't charge for the service.
	I hope that that's clear.
	This is a little bit of a tricky distinction for people.
	People get a little bit Confused about this.
	It might be the right thing to give away the product.
	I think that's a nice thing.
	But just because you're charging for something doesn't mean that it has to be copyrighted.
	Those are really different kinds of issues.
	Aaron Schwartz was particularly outraged that JSTOR was using the state to restrain access, to prevent access to these It was a lot of scientific literature that had been mostly written at taxpayer expense,
	you know, and was being withhold from the masses of people and being only allocated to, you know, specialists in a very strict area, a tiny elite, and their access to JSTOR was being provided again by tax dollars.
	It's just insane.
	So it was a very unjust system, and he smashed it.
	We talked about Oscar Wilde earlier and his effect on history.
	It's the same thing with Aaron Schwartz.
	So he was driven to despair and took his own life.
	But within a few weeks after his death, JSTOR made open access a general policy.
	More and more you see that JSTOR is opening it up further and further and further.
	So this moral example is having an effect On the future.
	He was dedicated to open source, and let's never forget what Aaron Schwartz was working on before his death.
	He was working on a new model of politics, an open source program that allowed all of us to have direct access to the people who purport to be in charge of our lives and give us a greater voice.
	It was kind of a revolutionary project, political project, he was working on.
	And I believe that's ultimately why they went after him.
	I completely agree, Jeffrey.
	And to me, Aaron Switzer was just so inspiring.
	And when I heard his story, I actually got chills down my spine thinking about how similar he and I were in terms of our ambitions and our ideologies concerning life.
	My thing ultimately with information socialism, and I'm going to shut my trap here, is that I'm vehemently against Stefan, egalitarianism purported by John Rawls.
	I talked about him on my second appearance on your show.
	We talked about his veil of ignorance and his social contract.
	What I think is distinct about informational socialism, and here's the example I use.
	If we're talking about socialism in the economic sense, and you have three people sitting around a table, and you have to distribute $300, and that's your $300 to start with, you're going to lose $200 because you have to give $100 to each guy.
	But if you're teaching those three people what two plus two equals and they learn that it's four, you don't forget that it's four.
	So to me, you don't lose anything really when you distribute this information.
	If anything, speaking economically, you're bringing more people into the pool to know how to apply that knowledge to ultimately enrich the market.
	And maybe that's a...
	naive point of view but that's really how I examined it when I was writing this essay and I just really hope it's something that can catch on and you know like you making your videos and me writing my essays people will start you know really not being afraid to make these kinds of contributions and not be so wary of the consequences because I think in the long run it makes for a healthier society and it certainly makes for healthier markets so that's just what I wanted to say about that I would certainly argue that where knowledge If
	I had a painless cure for AIDS that I could produce for free, and people could consume for free, And I withheld that from people.
	I think there would be a moral dimension to that.
	Doesn't mean I'm evil, doesn't mean that nobody gets to initiate the use of force against me.
	I'm not evil if I don't, if I'm a champion lifeguard and there's some kid drowning 10 feet off the shore, and I don't go in to help him, I'm not evil.
	But I'm kind of a real jerk.
	Like, I mean, there's an aesthetic aspect to ethics that I think is really important.
	And you can be incredibly wrong without being evil.
	And from my standpoint, if I was telling, I don't know, fun stories about camping, I mean, it's not a moral dimension really to that.
	If I was like Bill Bryson and just wrote these cute, cute stories about hiking trails and stuff like that, fine, right?
	And enjoyable.
	There's no moral dimension to it, although he did actually have a great point about people in Arkansas who rejected evolution, that they were not so much in danger of being descended from apes as overtaken by them, which I thought was some wonderfully witty lines.
	But so, art which has no particular moral dimension, fine, fine, fine.
	But art which has, or communication, literature, speeches that have a moral dimension are the medicines of mankind.
	For me to say, and this is, you know, I'm not saying this is a universal moral thing that I'll defend to the death, but if I have the capacity to bring some light of reason and virtue to the species, obviously it's good for me.
	That it gets distributed as widely as humanly possible for people to think rationally, for people to think critically, to think ahead and so on, to avoid mistakes.
	And if they listen to me about things like circumcision and not hitting your children, not yelling at your children, not violating the NAP with regards to parenting, great.
	Even though it cost me nothing fundamentally to create and produce that and it cost nothing to distribute it, if I were to charge for that, To me, that would be like charging a fairly unsupportable amount for people who could be cured for free.
	And to me, there's a moral dimension to that.
	And I thought about this a long time.
	It's a very hard thing for me to think about.
	Like when I decided, you know, six years ago to release my books for free, that was a hard decision.
	But I felt that if the books are helpful in bringing people to reason, to thinking, to virtue, to a better world, To withhold them and to charge for them when I could survive without doing that, there would be a moral dimension to that.
	I mean, the guy who invented the polio vaccine, he never patented it.
	He never made a penny off of it.
	Salk, I think his name was.
	And he just released it.
	And it was incredibly cheap because of that.
	He didn't sell it to a pharmaceutical company.
	The guy could have been a multi-multi-millionaire.
	If he'd held on to this.
	But think of the amount of good.
	I mean, polio used to be an unbelievably terrifying disease for people.
	I mean, it was like the AIDS that didn't kill you.
	I mean, you could stick in iron lungs.
	I mean, you'd be paralyzed, and public pools were a huge transmitter of these.
	Kids were terrified to go swimming.
	Their parents kept them in all the time.
	When there was a polio outbreak, everyone stayed inside, and they were terrified.
	I mean, it was an unbelievably terrifying disease.
	And to say, well, you know, you've got to give me 50 bucks for the vaccine, I mean, yeah, I get it.
	I'm a capitalist and all this, but to me, if you can survive reasonably well and give it away for free, I mean, I think you kind of should do that.
	Again, I'm not going to initiate force against you if you don't, but I would make a strong case for if your work has moral dimensions to it.
	Just try and get it in as many people's hands as humanly possible.
	Even if you never make a penny, you'll grow up and live and die in a better world than you found it.
	If you have kids, they'll grow up in a better world.
	There's a lot of selfish reasons for doing it.
	But I think when you have something that can literally save people's lives, I think that charging for it when you can survive without charging for it has a moral dimension to it.
	I take the work that I do enormously seriously.
	I take the work that other libertarians like Jeff do very seriously.
	We are saving lives.
	We are protecting people from war.
	We are protecting people from the enslavement of debt.
	We are very much vanguards.
	We are the first line of defense against tyranny and very often thinkers are the last line of defense against tyranny because if the thinkers fall, there's nobody left to protect people from the state.
	I take it very seriously and to me the idea that profit should be a primary motive in the distribution of security, safety, peace, protection and virtue to me is I think taking the market too far if that makes any sense.
	That's fascinating.
	That's fascinating.
	It's a very interesting moral commentary and I find it persuasive.
	There's an additional point that in the digital age There's no keeping information private anymore.
	Information, as the left often says, wants to be free.
	And there is that element.
	Information is the non-scarce good.
	The driving force of history is ever more revelation, ever more openness, ever more reverse engineering of what we know so that the productive power can be put into everybody's hands.
	Whether it's through 3D printing or, you know, YouTubing and creation, artistic creation, in every area, we're moving to a world of radical availability of information and openness.
	And there's nothing that's going to stop that.
	And to me, it's one of the most inspiring examples of how human action and the impulse and the push towards liberty ultimately will overtake The state's efforts to restrict and restrain and contain and censor.
	It's an unviable project.
	The state itself is an unviable project, but this particular aspect of the state is particularly unviable and unsustainable over the long term.
	Wow.
	Great.
	Thank you so much, Jeff.
	I know you have another commitment, so we are going to let you go.
	Thank you for a wonderful morning's conversation.
	It's really invigorating and energizing, and it's always, you know, drinking deep from the well of Jeffrey Tucker will always put a spring in your step, so thank you.
	Well, listen, I've learned so much from you, from your guests, from the venue.
	It's been very inspiring for me, so let me just express my profound thank you to you, and it's been an honor to be here, and I hope we can catch up again very soon.
	All right, thanks.
	And it's lfb.org to go and check out Jeff's lfb.org forward slash stefan if you want to sign up for the book club, which I'd highly recommend.
	Thanks again.
	Have yourselves a wonderful week, everyone.
	I love you guys.
	The most incredible listener conversations, the most incredible conversations that I know of that are recorded and broadcast at least.
	So thank you, everyone.
	Thank you, Jeff.
	Thank you, Mike.
	If you'd like to help out, fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	And please do share the Syria video if we can make a measurable change, even if it's small in public opinion.
	We literally could do a good day's work in saving thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives.
	So thanks, everyone.
	Have a great week.
	I will see you Wednesday night for the 8 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time show.
	And for the next Sunday show, we are seven days minus two hours.
	Have a great day.
	Thanks.

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